meta tag

1 definition found

meta tag - Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 May 2007) :

  META element
  META tag
  
     <World-Wide Web> An element, with tag name of "META",
     expressing meta-data about a given HTML document.  HTML
     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://foldoc.org/">
  
     Other properties may be application-specific.  For example,
     the Robots Exclusion (http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots.html)
     .
     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)