<HEAD> Elements - META

The <META> element appears only in the <HEAD> section of an HTML document. It is to identify specialized document meta-information, which serves one of two functions:

provides availability and access information to a browser
provide information about content, quality and features of the current document

Each <META> element must contain a name/vlaue pair or either HTTP-EQUIV/CONTENT or NAME/CONTENT type. HTTP-EQUIV specifies information which can be read by the server to formulate a document header prior to sending the document to a browser. NAME specifies embedded details about the document for use by the author.

HTTP-EQUIV Example

If the document contains:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires"       CONTENT="Mon, 23 Mar 1999 17:30:00 GMT">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Last-Modified" CONTENT="Wed, 23 Sep 1998 18:30:00 GMT">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Keywords"      CONTENT="Bill">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Reply-to"      CONTENT="[email protected] (Bill Cassidy)">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Keywords"      CONTENT="Design">

Then the server will usually include the following in the document header:

Expires: Mon, 23 Mar 1999 17:30:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 18:30:00 GMT
Keywords: Bill, Design
Reply-to: [email protected] (Bill Cassidy)

When the document is requested by a user agent.

NAME Example

NAME provides details about the document which is used by the author and some programs referred to as robots or spiders. These are used by Web Search Engines to locate information to include in the search database. Some common values for NAME are:

Description
Description of the HTML document's contents
Author
Name of the web page creator

For example:

<META NAME="Description"
      CONTENT="Information describing the use of the <META> Element in HTML">

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