: Usage of meta tag "generator" Is the meta tag "generator" still relevant in today's web? Has it every had any use? <meta name="Generator" content="Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)" />

@Frith620

It could be a significant security risk. I remove it if it shows up on any sites I do.

If the generator is one with an identified security flaw, it's like a big lighted sign, saying "use Drupal exploit HERE!"

You might think what you have there is secure… today. If I were one to write exploits, I'd be spidering and indexing on this tag, then as soon as a new exploit is discovered, I'd target my exploits to sites known to be vulnerable.

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@Angie530

As far as "use" that's obvious: to identify what was used to produce the current document. Of course it's trivial to provide bad information in there.

It was never especially relevant in the first place.
Other than as a curiosity for nosy users viewing source code, the only significant applications of the tag I've ever seen tended toward scraping a bunch of sites and saying X of them were built with Drupal, et al. which has the significant flaw of not counting sites that just leave the tag off(or lie).

Also note a lot of common meta tags are simply convention; the HTML 4 spec didn't bother defining acceptable values for the meta name attribute. Since it's actually been codified in the HTML5 spec, (HTML 4 didn't bother) some real practical purpose may eventually come about.

If the ultimate question is whether you should include the tag, it's your choice. There won't be any noticeable benefit, and it's arguably a (very minor) security leak, given that it provides information that could be used to determine vulnerabilities.

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@Nickens628

The question is "What value does it add to my website?"

In the world of trucking, we have a term, payload. Payload brings in a return for carrying it, the rest is non-paying and therefore a fuel expense. Excess meta tags that aren't being used by anyone just add to the load time, eat clock cycles, disk space and transmission packets.

Meta tags are only useful if searching, indexing or special use consumers use them. Titles, if your content is being absorbed by indexing systems that use it, Dublin Core, various geolocation tags, description and other metas used by social networking.

It's probably more useful to work with microformat/rich snippet type markup.

As to the "Generator" meta tag, it only ever was an advertisement for Adobe, et. al. to say, "Hey, lookie, my software was used to create the page!" Someone else might chime in with an actual example of relevance, but I haven't seen anything that made me not strip it as useless content.

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