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As far as I can tell, property is not a valid attribute of the <meta> tag in any of HTML 3, 4, XHTML-Transitional or XHTML-Strict. So why does the Open Graph Protocol (and Facebook's API docs) specify example code like this?

<html xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#">
<head>
<title>The Rock (1996)</title>
<meta property="og:title" content="The Rock" />
<meta property="og:type" content="movie" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/rock.jpg" />

This doesn't validate. Changing property to name does validate, and I can verify that, at least on Facebook, it still works as intended. So why do they use property in their example code?

http://opengraphprotocol.org/

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1 Answer

up vote 0 down vote accepted

They define their own custom DTD (definition of DTD). This allows them to create their own extension to the HTML standard and as long as they follow their own DTD they are technically ok. It won't be valid HTML but it doesn't have to be.

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1  
Why not? How hard would it have been to do it right? – reinierpost Sep 16 '10 at 8:38
Does it have to be pure HTML to be right? – John Conde♦ Sep 17 '10 at 11:53

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