I don't understand why you are floating it in the first place. I'd change the meta paragraph to a div using that class and then use a list or paragraphs within for each line. OR, use line breaks. BTW, you are also using <br> in an xhtml document. It should be

<div class="meta">
<p>whatever you want here</p>
<p>whatever you want here</p>
<p>whatever you want here</p>
<p>whatever you want here</p>
</div>

or keep it a paragraph, use linebreaks to get separate lines. OR, us an unordered list and list items (most semantically correct, imo)

floating should be avoided unless it is the only thing that will do the trick. It's buggy, especially in IE browsers. Sometimes declaring position:relative helps (or can add other types of bugs, but hey, that the drawback of floating). I'd never use the display:inline like suggested by someone above. If anything, if you simply feel you MUST float a span, you should declare display:block and use a width.

But none of that is even necessary. BTW, you can look at the generated source and see that the php is working. It is your css and markup that is the issue.