META element


META element

(World-Wide Web)An element, with tag name of "META",expressing meta-data about a given HTML document. HTMLstandards do not require that documents have META elements;but if META elements occur, they must be inside the document'sHEAD element.

The META element can be used to identify properties of adocument (e.g., author, expiration date, a list of key words,etc.) and assign values to those properties, typically byspecifying a NAME attribute (to name the property) and aCONTENT attribute (to assign a value for that property). TheHTML 4 specification doesn't standardise particular NAMEproperties or CONTENT values; but it is conventional to use a"Description" property to convey a short summary of thedocument, and a "Keywords" property to provide a list ofkeywords relevant to the document, as in:



META elements with HTTP-EQUIV and CONTENT attributes cansimulate the effect of HTTP header lines, as in:



Other properties may be application-specific. For example,the Robots Exclusion.standard uses the "robots" property for asserting that thegiven document should not be indexed by robots, nor shouldlinks in it be followed: