[whatwg] Proposal: Change HTML spec to allow any arbitrary value for the <meta> "name" attribute

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 11:33 AM, Robin Berjon <robin at w3.org> wrote:
> Yes, I'm well aware. I even have a patch for that bug. It was just the first
> example that came to mind; meta is often the first thing that developers
> reach for. If the validation errors on metadata names served a clearly
> useful purpose I'd suggest waiting it out until using data-* becomes more of
> a reflex, but that doesn't seem to be the case so the pain inflicted in the
> meantime doesn't appear to be useful.

It seems conceptually problematic for something to be both
semantically similar to data-* and say element names, but in practice
<meta name> seems to work okay. I think there might still be some
value in the registry though and enforcing requirements for the names
that are shared globally (gives developers feedback as to whether
their <meta> elements might get incorrectly processed by software),
and maybe issuing a warning for names not registered (you might have
made an unintentional typo or you might want it registered for better
validation).


--
http://annevankesteren.nl/