html - What happens if the meta tags are present in the document body?

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html - What happens if the meta tags are present in the document body?

posted Oct 17, 2021 in Technique[技术] by 深蓝 (71.8m points)

html - What happens if the meta tags are present in the document body?

I am working on a ASP application and the code, template and files are organized in a way that does not allow me to alter anything outside the body tag. So I am thinking about inserting the meta tags inside the body -- like this:

<!-- FEW ASP INCLUDES -->
<html>
    <head>
    <!-- FALLBACK TITLE AND DESCRIPTION -->
    <title>Default Title</title>
    <meta name="description" content="Default Description">
</head>
<body>
    <!-- SOME HTML MARKUP -->
    <div class="dynamic-content">
        <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="dynamic-content" -->
        <!-- THIS IS WHERE I CAN WRITE ASP CODE -->
        <title><%= Page.Meta.GetTitle( yada, yada ) %></title>
        <meta name="description" content="<%= Page.Meta.GetDescription( yada, yada ) %>">
        <!-- InstanceEndEditable -->
    </div>
    <!-- SOME MORE HTML MARKUP -->
</body>
</html>

I am wondering how good it is to put meta tags inside the body of an HTML document. How does it affect:

search engines
browsers

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1 Reply

深蓝 · Answer 1 · 2021-10-17T00:07:05+0000

This is of course invalid as per HTML4.01. META tags are only allowed within HEAD (just like, say, TITLE) so by putting it into a BODY, you're essentially creating an invalid markup.

From the cursory tests, it seems that some browsers (e.g. Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4) actually put these elements into HEAD when creating a document tree. This is not very surprising: browsers are known to tolerate and try to interpret all kinds of broken markup.

Having invalid markup is rarely a good idea. Non-standard handling by browsers might lead to various hard-to-pin rendering (and behavioral) inconsistencies. Instead of relying on browser guessing, it's best to follow a standard.

I don't know how search engines react to such tag soup, but I wouldn't risk experimenting to find out :) Perhaps they only parse HEAD tag for certain information and will skip your BODY-contained tags altogether. Or maybe they consider these to be some malicious gambling attempts and black-list pages containing such markup. Who knows.

The bottom line — avoid this whenever possible.

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html - What happens if the meta tags are present in the document body?

html - What happens if the meta tags are present in the document body?

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