Within my HTML meta data, should it be © or ©

Question

Within my copyright meta data I have the following

<meta name="copyright" content="example.com &#169; Copyright 2011 by Me. All Rights Reserved." />

Is this correct, or should I simply have the following?

<meta name="copyright" content="example.com © Copyright 2011 by Me. All Rights Reserved." />

Answer 1

Why do you want to put the © symbol in a meta tag that already has the attribute name="copyright"?

Answer 2

I believe both are perfectly valid, so it should come down to the difference between entities and Unicode characters.

HTML Entities are the safe way to go. They will show up on all modern browsers, but are a bit of a pain in source code. Plus, it's several characters to represent a single character, which isn't as efficient as it could be. If you were going to go with the entity, I would recommend using © instead, for readability.

Embedding the copyright symbol should work just fine, as long as you have your encoding set correctly. However, if you run into encoding issues, you can get all sorts of display issues that are unsightly and hard to deal with. If it's in your meta tag, then you shouldn't have display issues, but it's something to take into consideration.

I usually use the single character. That's what it's there for, and it's a couple fewer bytes off of each page load.

Answer 3

Hi I tried to use: © and also © in the meta. The result is that it just displays the code in view source output as seen below.

<meta name="copyright" content="&copy; 2013 - Co NAme" />

This works:

<meta name="copyright" content="2013 - Co Name" />

Forget the symbol and do what @Osvoldo mentioned. This seems to be proper form.

Answer 4

If the symbol is found anywhere in your file, it will fail WC3 verification. Based on that I would think &#169 is correct.

Test it out here: http://validator.w3.org/check