What's the difference between meta name and meta property?

Question

Two common meta element attributes are:

<meta name="" content="">

and

<meta property="" content="">

what is the difference between meta name and meta property?

Alost

Answer 1

The name attribute is the "usual" way for specifying metadata in HTML. It’s defined in the HTML5 spec.

The property attribute comes from RDFa.

RDFa 1.1 extends HTML5 so that it’s valid to use meta and link elements in the body, as long as they contain a property attribute.

You can use both ways, HTML5’s name and RDFa’s property, together on the same meta element.

Note that you might also see meta elements with an itemprop attribute. That would be from Microdata.

Lassalle

Google is giving advice for duplicated meta tags. And its counting the property="og:dscription" and name="description" attributes as the same – Edora

Is it Frondor's argument true? – Leer

@Pascut: Discussing the behaviour of Google’s search engine is off-topic on Stack Overflow. You could create a question on Webmasters asking about it. – Lassalle

When using the meta viewport tag, please use name instead of property. Property doesn't work in every browser. – Cressler

@PieterMoeyersons: Using viewport as value for the property attribute would mean something totally different from using it as value for the name property; it’s not that some browsers support it like that and some don’t (at least, it should not be), and browsers typically don’t use RDFa anyway (it’s for RDFa parsers, browser add-ons, etc.). – Lassalle

I have noticed that the linter ignores name|value and name|content tags – it only works specifically with property|content. – Sentimentalism

Is it good if I include the two attribute? The <meta name = "description"> and <meta property = "og:description"? – Hampden

@sack: It’s allowed, yes, but if they have the same value, you could also use one meta element: <meta name="description" property="og:description" content=""> – Lassalle

@Lassalle Is that why Open Graph protocol used property instead of name? So we could use both attributes in the same meta element? – Scyphus

@mrmowji: I don’t think that this was the primary reason. They use RDFa most likely because it’s the right tool for the job (providing RDF-based structured data in HTML), and with it comes the feature of re-using existing HTML elements, but that’s not the only feature. – Lassalle

Giving that these comments report that i.e. viewport should rather use name, but other situations even rightout ignore name, is there reliable documentation about when to use what attribute? – Sentimentalism

When I was using only name="og:image", LinkedIn would just get some random image from the page, sometimes even selected an icon. Now that I use both (name="image" property="og:image") it gets the right image. – Argali