META element

World-Wide Web An element, with tag name of "META",

expressing meta-data about a given HTML document. HTML

standards do not require that documents have META elements;

but if META elements occur, they must be inside the document's

HEAD element.

The META element can be used to identify properties of a

document (e.g., author, expiration date, a list of key words,

etc.) and assign values to those properties, typically by

specifying a NAME attribute (to name the property) and a

CONTENT attribute (to assign a value for that property). The

HTML 4 specification doesn't standardise particular NAME

properties or CONTENT values; but it is conventional to use a

"Description" property to convey a short summary of the

document, and a "Keywords" property to provide a list of

keywords relevant to the document, as in:

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Information from around the

world on kumquat farming techniques and current kumquat

production and consumption data"

META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="kumquat, Fortunella"

META elements with HTTP-EQUIV and CONTENT attributes can

simulate the effect of HTTP header lines, as in:

META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Tue, 22 Mar 2000 16:18:35 GMT"

META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="10; URL=http://www.foldoc.org/"

Other properties may be application-specific. For example,

the Robots Exclusion.

standard uses the "robots" property for asserting that the

given document should not be indexed by robots, nor should

links in it be followed:

META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,follow"

(2001-02-07)