2 Canonical questions

[Marketing_Today]

QUESTION 1
I'm working on a site where a canonical link is implemented as

That's not the normal format that I am used to, as I would have written it as

Is that a problem?

QUESTION 2
Why do so many sites these days have a sitewide canonical tag which refers to itself as the canonical?
For example: http://www.site.co.uk/page has a canonical of

[The_Sage]

Q1: Both of those pieces of code mean the same thing. You can use the "attributes" (href, rel) interchangeably.

Q2: It stops page scrapers.

[MickEdwards]

Attributes and their corresponding values can be in any order within a tag.

Having a self referring canonical tag also helps eliminate duplication issues if the site produces query strings appended to the URL. There is no ambiguity as to which is the "real" URL.