One wants to be able to mark up the contents of META (and thus it
or some other element, to be invented, needs to allow content)
because such undeniably common pieces of metadata as Title and
Publisher may need to require such things as italics and superscripts.
Even Subject could require superscripts.
I disagree. You are now proposing not only displayable meta data, but
styled meta data. Such information should be placed in BODY (like
BANNER), and not in HEAD. A true meta data container would not permit
element or mixed content since that would defeat its function of
encapsulating arbitrary meta data (for which you would not wish markup
to be recognized).
Glenn