Using <meta> Tags
The <meta>
tag has a
wide variety of applications, but is primarily used to include
information about a document, such as the creation date, author, or
copyright information. The data included in a
<meta> tag is useful for servers, web
browsers, and search engines but is invisible to the reader. It must
always be placed within the <head> of the
document.
A document may have any number of <meta>
tags. There are two types of <meta> tags,
using either the name
or
http-equiv
attribute. In each case, the
content
attribute is necessary to provide a value
(or values) for the named information or function. The examples below
show basic <meta> tag syntax. In the
following sections, we will look at each type of meta tag and its
uses.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="name" CONTENT="content"> <META NAME="name" CONTENT="content">
The http - equiv Attribute
Information provided by an
http-equiv
attribute is processed as though it
had come from an HTTP response header. HTTP headers contain
information the server passes to the browser just before it sends the
HTML document. It contains MIME type information and other values
that affect the action of the browser. Therefore, the
http-equiv attribute provides information that
will, depending on the tag description, affect the way the browser
handles your document.
There are a large number of predefined http-equiv types available. This section will look at just a few of the most useful. For a complete listing, see the Dictionary of HTML META ...
Get Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
