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://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)
Nearby terms:
Metadata « meta-data « Metadata Information Partners
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