Suggested meta tags for HTML 5 that should be considered a must have
There is no such thing as minimum meta tags (unless of course I got your question wrong). As far as I am aware no meta tag is required and the ones you add are the ones for your specific needs.
Consider the following document:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title>Some Title</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
You can validate it and not get any warning whatsoever. The validator just reminds you that the default encoding is missing. This is not even a warning, just an information.
The working draft has this to say about meta tags:
The meta element represents various kinds of metadata that cannot be expressed using the title, base, link, style, and script elements.
And it goes on:
4.2.5.1 Standard metadata names
application-name, author, description, generator, keywords
Further it mentions some additional tags concerning a page's status, contextual representation and character encoding.
Although none of these ar explicitly required by the standard, there are in fact best practices, especially concerning search engine optimization (SEO). This has nothing to do with the HTML standard but with web (search) crawlers.
You can get some good advice which meta tags matter (for Google) at the Webmaster Tools meta tag support page
w3c markup validation
HTML specification defines a few names for the name attribute of the meta element.
meta name="copyright"
is not defined in this specification.
Please try this:
<meta name="dcterms.rightsHolder" content="Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Skyline" >
Meta name Distribution in HTML5
dcterms.audience
is often used for the purpose of distribution classes. Check out Dublin Core.
Dublin Core and Metaname cause W3C Validation Issues in HTML5 page
These are the standard meta
names defined in the HTML5 spec:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/document-metadata.html#standard-metadata-names
Additional names need to be registered at:
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions
So for HTML5, you are free to use the name
values listed on these two links, but values not listed there are not valid.
If you use a registered keyword and a validator reports it as error, the validator is probably not up to date (new keywords can be registered in the wiki at any time).
EDIT: as requested in the comments, a valid example of the use with the name dc.language
:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Test</title>
<meta name="dc.language" content="en">
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
You can validate it with http://validator.w3.org/ (using "Direct Input").
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