Meta tags itemprop

Question

I am trying to include extracted structured data in my webpages.

I included this for description:

<meta itemprop="description" content="my description" />

However I realised that there is already a normal meta description on the page:

<meta name="description" content="my description" />

Is it ok to leave both of them or it is really necessary to merge them together maybe like:

<meta itemprop="description" name="description" content="" />

Answer 1

You should leave both of them. The Microdata Spec says:

If a meta element has an itemprop attribute, the name, http-equiv, and charset attributes must be omitted, and the content attribute must be present.

so it would be invalid to merge them.