Digital Marketing Handbook

Meta element 110

[ 19 ]Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (http:/ / http://www. w3. org/ TR/ 1999/ WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH-19990217/

wai-pageauth-tech) W3C Working Draft 17-Feb-1999

[ 20 ]Accessibility.blockautorefresh (http:/ / web. archive. org/ web/ 20090602225157/ http:/ / kb. mozillazine. org/ Accessibility.

blockautorefresh) mozillaZine, archived June 2 2009 from the original (http:/ / kb. mozillazine. org/ Accessibility. blockautorefresh)

[ 21 ]W3C Recommendation (May 5, 1999), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 - Guideline 7 (http:/ / http://www. w3. org/ TR/ 1999/

WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/ #gl-movement). W3.org, retrieved September 28, 2007

[ 22 ]http:/ / http://www. asindexing. org

External links

• W3C HTML 4.01 Specification: section 7.4.4, Meta data (http:/ / http://www. w3. org/ TR/ html4/ struct/ global.
  html#h-7. 4. 4)

Meta tags

Meta elements are the HTML or XHTML <meta ... > element used to provide structured metadata about a Web

page. Multiple elements are often used on the same page: the element is the same, but its attributes are different.

Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the

other head elements and attributes.

The meta element has two uses: either to emulate the use of the HTTP response header, or to embed additional

metadata within the HTML document.

With HTML up to and including HTML 4.01 and XHTML, there were four valid attributes: content,

http-equiv, name and scheme. Under HTML 5 there are now five valid attributes: charset having been

added. http-equiv is used to emulate the HTTP header. name to embed metadata. The value of the statement,

in either case, is contained in the content attribute, which is the only required attribute unless charset is

given. charset is used to indicate the character set of the document, and is available in HTML5.

Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document.

An example of the use of the meta element

In one form, meta elements can specify HTTP headers which should be sent before the actual content when the

HTML page is served from Web server to client. For example:

This specifies that the page should be served with an HTTP header called 'Content-Type' that has a value 'text/html'.

In the general form, a meta element specifies name and associated content attributes describing aspects of the

HTML page. For example:

In this example, the meta element identifies itself as containing the 'keywords' relevant to the document, Wikipedia

and encyclopedia.

Meta tags can be used to indicate the location a business serves:

In this example, geographical information is given according to ZIP codes.

Default charset for plain text is simply set with meta: