Ask HN: Is HTML meta field a hell incarnated?

[renegat0x0]

Why oh why we have so many meta data? Yeah I know, everybody can think of their own meta data, and start their own standards. Let's have a new standard to handle all these other standards.

Some articles have something like:

<meta property="article:publish_time" content="data"/>

Spotify has:

<meta name="music:release_date" content="data"/>

YouTube has:

<meta itemprop="datePublished" content="data"/>

There seems to be at least "some" attempts to clear this, but it's outdated:

https://github.com/kevinSuttle/html-meta-tags

Why no organization manages it, or maybe there is, but I have not heard about it?

Is meta is a nice bag for all 'custom' stuff? We can put there whatever we want?

[DamonHD]

Follow an organised system such as schema.org if you want your metadata to be widely understood. And it need not all be in meta tags in that case.

Try this tool against pages such as YouTube or www.earth.org.uk:

https://validator.schema.org/

[Devasta]

There were attempts in the past to formalize stuff like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core

To be honest, in the modern age it's not reasonable to have any expectation of quality when it comes to HTML.

[DamonHD → Devasta]

If you want search engines (or other automatic systems) to grok your metadata then you have to be organised. And it is easy to validate (or not), both the HTML and the metadata.