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Clarifying correct usage for <meta name="format-detection">

I cannot find a standard W3 or WHAT-WG (or even non-standard third-party) spec for:

<meta name="format-detection">

I have two principle questions.

Question 1: What formats may be referenced in the format-detection meta-tag?

Most commonly, third-party references cite telephone.

Occasionally email or date are cited.

More rarely, address is cited.

One source (https://www.goodemailcode.com/email-code/template.html) cites url.

This gives the following list of formats:

  • telephone
  • email
  • date
  • address
  • url

Is that the complete list of formats? Are there any others?

Question 2: Must each format be individually referenced, or can any number of formats be referenced together in a single meta-tag?

That is to ask, is it necessary to declare:

<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">
<meta name="format-detection" content="email=no">
<meta name="format-detection" content="date=no">
<meta name="format-detection" content="address=no">
<meta name="format-detection" content="url=no">

Or is this perfectly acceptable:

<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no, email=no, date=no, address=no, url=no">

If format-detection isn't an accepted standard, I'm entirely happy to refer to a non-standard spec (or blog post), so long as the document has some authority and isn't simply a third-party observation or comment.

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Rounin - Glory to UKRAINE Avatar asked May 05 '26 00:05

Rounin - Glory to UKRAINE


1 Answers

Everything I found on this was quite dated, even compared to the 2021 date of the question. For example, this Apple link from 2014:

By default, Safari on iOS detects any string formatted like a phone number and makes it a link that calls the number. Specifying telephone=no disables this feature.

There is no mention of it in MDN or caniuse. Based on that Apple document, only telephone seems to have had any official kind of support, I'm not sure whether that's still the case. I would not have relied on any other values working back then; even less so now.

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miken32 Avatar answered May 11 '26 17:05

miken32