A colleague of mine noticed the way they provide key-value pairs (most likely also for their https://github.com/airbnb/polyglot.js) but oddly doing so via "<meta content=". There is also application settings in there.
I wonder what the reason might be. JS variables is what I would have expected.
some examples:
https://gist.github.com/christophstrasen/9c13e1a94c0aff25844e (settings)
https://gist.github.com/christophstrasen/f7ae6424089001aecdc8 (locale)
https://gist.github.com/christophstrasen/847d13719bf557a6b823 (translation)
Ideas:
- More comfortable to access via the DOM?
- SEO (but why config settings?)
- Caching
Another reason would be that they keep the same HEAD but swap out the BODY for things like a/b testing, caching, page loading, etc.
Either way, after you determine that you don't want to store JSON as part of your BODY, the HEAD is the only other place you can store it, and if you don't want to generate code, then META tags probably make the most semantic sense.