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Is it really worth using a timestamp instead of the normal date format in meta tags?

Can I use a timestamp instead of the normal date format in meta tags?

eg:

<meta name="revised" content="Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 2:51 pm" />

to

<meta name="revised" content="1431475718" />

or for

<META NAME="Expires" CONTENT="1431475718">
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2 answers


You cannot use revised

or expires

in HTML5, as these metadata names are not defined in the specification , and are registered with MetaExtensions .

Nobody tried to register revised

. Someone tried to check in expires

, but the spec was missing, so it wasn't approved.



So...

  • without specifications for these metadata names, authors don't know when and how to use them, and consumers don't know how to interpret them.

  • If there are specifications, these metadata names can be registered with MetaExtensions , and it would be clear what format should be meaningful.

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From my research [1] [2] , it seems that there is no approved format, however ISO 8601 is recommended .

Date can be used to express temporal information at any level of detail. The recommended best practice is to use an encoding scheme such as the ISO 8601 W3CDTF profile [W3CDTF].



Google also recommends this format. You can use timestamps and some crawlers will try to handle them (like Google), you would be better off following ISO 8601 (2015-05-03T15: 38: 45 + 00: 00).

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