Yakovlev [On bicompacta in -products and related spaces, Comment. Math. Univ. Carolin. 21.2 (1980), 263–283] showed that any Eberlein compactum is hereditarily -metacompact. We show that this property actually characterizes Eberlein compacta among compact spaces of finite metrizability number. Uniformly Eberlein compacta and Corson compacta of finite metrizability number can be characterized in an analogous way.
We prove in particular that a continuous image of a Valdivia compact space is Corson provided it contains no homeomorphic copy of the ordinal segment . This generalizes a result of R. Deville and G. Godefroy who proved it for Valdivia compact spaces. We give also a refinement of their result which yields a pointwise version of retractions on a Valdivia compact space.
We show that for "most" compact nonmetrizable spaces, the unit ball of the Banach space C(K) contains an uncountable 2-equilateral set. We also give examples of compact nonmetrizable spaces K such that the minimum cardinality of a maximal equilateral set in C(K) is countable.