head tag
TAG: meta
<meta>
Available in versions: 2.0, 3.2, 4.0
Browser compatibility: Explorer 4, 5 Netscape 4, 6
The
<meta>
tag is primarily used to list information (meta data) about the current HTML document. This information can be anything you want users to know about your site including author names, keywords, subject matter, and topics of interest. This meta data is used extensively by the various Internet search engines.
The
meta
tag can also be used with the
http-equiv
attribute to simulate HTTP headers.
This tag presents the information as name/content paired values by using the
name
and
content
attributes. You can have more than one
meta
element per page.
This tag can only be placed inside the
head
element. There is no closing tag.
Core Attributes
dir
lang
Attributes
content
The
content
attribute is the content portion of the name/content value. There are no defined values for this attribute. You may choose any words or text you desire. For example, you could choose "keywords" for the
name
and then use the
content
attribute to list keywords that you feel are important to your site.
http-equiv
The
http-equiv
attribute can be used in place of the
name
attribute to create an http-equiv/content value pair. It provides information used to generate HTTP headers (however, most proxy servers ignore this attribute). The permitted values are
content-type, expires, refresh,
and
set-cookie
.
name
The
name
attribute is the name portion of the name/content value. There are no defined values for this attribute. You may choose any word you desire. For example, you could choose "keywords" for the
name
and then use the
content
attribute to list keywords that you feel are important to your site.
scheme
The
scheme
attribute sets the scheme (the procedure) for interpreting the meta data. This must agree with the profiles listed by the
profile
attribute of the
head
tag.
Code:
<head>
<meta name="author" content="The Guru">
<meta name="description" content="DevGuru Cascading Style Sheets Quick Reference is a 40 page reference that discusses the style properties that set specific visual parameters for a Web page.">
<meta name="keywords" content="DevGuru, CSS, css, Cascading Style Sheet, cascading style sheet, style sheet, background, border, floating elements, font, margin, padding, text">
<title>DevGuru Cascading Style Sheets Quick Reference</title>
</head>
The
http-equiv
attribute can be used to update a page. In this example, the update occurs every thirty seconds.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30">
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