I couldn’t disagree more. “Stray <code>&lt;li/&gt;</code>s all over the pageâ€ surely would be better than a bunch of proprietary <code>meta</code> tags that will only be used by one browser anyway.

The current solution, although indeed a legitimate way of adding meta-data to a document, is not helping interoperability. If we standardize this behavior from the start, other UAs can easily adopt this pattern in the future.

If there's a standards-based way of doing things, there's no need to resort to solutions that are 100% proprietary.