HTML
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="title" content="blah blah" />
<meta name="description" content="yadda yadda" />
<meta name="keywords" content="words, words, words" />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="language" content="en" />
<title>blah blah</title>
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/favicon.png" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="title" content="blah blah" />
<meta name="description" content="yadda yadda" />
<meta name="keywords" content="words, words, words" />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="language" content="en" />
<title>blah blah</title>
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/favicon.png" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
I pointed out to the client that the meta "Content-Type" tag comes up twice, the meta robots tag is superfluous if it has that content (as it does on every page of the site) and that if you've got a <title> element, you have no need for a meta title element (and yes, they have identical content).
They passed this information on to their developer. He removed the extra Content-Type tag, but sent the following comment regarding the two titles:
QUOTE
[The CMS] generates meta title in two different formats to ensure compatibility. If a spider or a browser understands one type, it simply ignores the other.
I've seen pages with either version of the title tag, and as far as I know, both versions are understood by every spider and every browser. As I understand it, it doesn't really matter which one you use, because both will work. If I'm right about that, there's never a reason to use both. And for what it's worth, neither one was ignored by the tool that pointed them out to me (the SearchStatus extension for Firefox). I requested the page's meta data, and it returned two copies of the title.
Apart from just being superfluous code (which I try to avoid whenever possible), I don't think the extra title is doing any harm (as long as we never get into a situation with two different titles battling each other for attention, and it doesn't look like the CMS would do that), but is there any truth to this idea that a page needs both versions, in case there's a user-agent out there that doesn't understand one of them?
