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