My vote is for the <title>Your Title</title> method. My own personal standpoint, though, is through the lens of search engine optimization. Here are my arguents/sources:
1) Search Engines reportedly index pages differently whether using the meta method or the <title> tag method: http://www.webmarketingnow
2) The TITLE tag in SEO is almost unanimously exalted as the most important element, and meta tags less important. I would copy/paste my text, but I'm kind of afraid of improper citations and copyrights, so I'll just say that this is VERY clear in Planet Ocean's eBook (a top SEO firm). The basic idea is, it can't be stressed enough to use the <title> tag...and it's often been overstressed to use <meta> tags when search engines don't care as much...but you should still do the meta description/keyword tags. I realize this doesn't speak directly to the <title> versus <meta type="title" content="blah blah"> argument, but it does speak to search engine bots' priority of tags to index.
3) When I personally do the <meta type="title" --method, my current browser/cpu setup does not display the title at the top of the page -- only when I use the <title> method.
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So there's my 2c. The first link I believe is the most informative, and I realize my stance is based around an SEO perspective, but my vote is to stick with the <title> tag...a search engine's best friend!
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by: dbruntonPosted on 2008-05-04 at 18:57:16ID: 21497731
Interesting. Some links. No definitive answers yet. Conflicting opinions.
http://www.webproworld.com
http://www.highrankings.co
http://webtips.dan.info/ti
This one below is better
http://www.velocityreviews
What is seems is that some search engines use the <title> tag. Google doesn't. Others do.
The search engines seem to ignore the meta tags. Google ignores them as well.
So short story. Some search engines will use the <title> tag and none of them seem to use the meta tags. The Dublin Core initiative was supposed to make meta tags useful to search engines but it doesn't seem to have worked.