metacrap

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metacrap is a general purpose derogatory term referring to the poor quality of meta information like those in meta tags category, description, OGP, Twitter Cards, and other DRY violations outside the primary content of a page, introduced in a 2001 essay by Cory Doctorow.

How not to

Avoid metacrap by instead making sure all meaningful content is in the content of a page, and marking it up with microformats so machines looking for that content (the usual use-case for most metacrap) can find it.

Examples

HTML content

• https://twitter.com/hdv/status/1291365801015095298 and Jeremy Keith’s reply https://twitter.com/adactio/status/1291384588061888514
  • "When you add content that's not visual, like `aria-label`, always be asking: how will this be maintained?
    
    I increasingly see sites with non-sensical `aria-label` attributes, because the context changed, but the attribute was not updated." @hdv August 6, 2020

Meta tags

• Decaying Silos as dead malls 2018-01-20
• Replies to Silos only at my own site

Wikipedia

• Wikipedia used to have an article on metacrap, which has subsequently been changed into a barely applicable redirect. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Metacrap&oldid=830562352 for the latest actual Wikipedia metacrap article content, and consider if the issues noted there can be resolved with citations.
• ^ There are some good citations and advice for improving the Wikipedia metacrap article on its Talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Metacrap

See Also

• WET
• HTML spec proposal to disallow further meta name proposals: #2335 Make spec state that <meta name> must not be use for any new features with UA processing requirements, and instead new attribute should be minted: <meta newfeature=value>