Is there any advantage...
Better yet: half of them can simply be removed.
language: shift this to the overall html tag in the form
<html lang="en">
Yes, we all know that G### simply ignores any and all <lang> declarations, but that doesn't mean we should withhold the information from human browsers and others that do use it.
distribution: Sorry, no idea. Someone else (phranque?) may know.
robots: unless you're saying something
other than the default, this isn't needed at all. The declarations "noindex" and/or "nofollow" can go on the individual page, if it only applies to one, or in the config/htaccess for the whole directory, if the same rule applies to all of it.
referrer: Again, no idea. But the content kinda sounds like something modern browsers do by default anyway.
content-type:
Not needed in HTML 5 (opening declaration <html> and-that's-all, with language optional)
viewport:
keep this unless there exists a reliable once-and-for-all Apache declaration, in which case I should upgrade my own site
For comparison purposes, most of my <head> sections start like this (copy-and-paste from the boilerplate that I use in any new page):
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang = "en">
<head>
<meta charset = "UTF-8">
<title>blahblah</title>
<meta name = "description" content = "blahblah">
<meta name = "viewport" content = "width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<link rel = "stylesheet" type = "text/css" [and so on depending on page and directory: generally two, sometimes three shared stylesheets in addition to page-specific styles]
<style>
</style>
</head>
Special note about charset: If you set a charset in config/htaccess,
this will override anything set in the page itself. (Yes, this is counterintuitive, because most things work the other way around) But I like to also set it on each page, to ensure that things are read correctly if, say, someone temporarily downloads the page for offline study. If your <title> contains any non-ASCII characters, make sure the charset declaration, if any, comes before the title.
