meta Element
Description
The meta element defines metadata for your document.
You can use this element in different ways, and an HTML document can contain multiple meta elements.
meta element has local Attributes,
including name, content, charset, http-equiv.
The charset attribute is new in HTML5.
The HTML4 scheme attribute is now obsolete.
Each instance of the meta element can be used for only one of these purposes.
Name/Value Metadata Pairs
The first use for the meta element is to define
metadata in name/value pairs, for which you use the name
and content attributes.
The following code uses the meta Element to Define Metadata in Name/Value Pairs.
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<meta name="author" content="java2s.com"/>
<meta name="description" content="A simple example"/>
</head><!-- w w w . j a va 2 s. co m-->
<body>
<a href="http://java2s.com">Visit java2s.com</a>
</body>
</html>
You use the name attribute to specify which type of metadata the element refers to,
and the content attribute to provide a value.
The following table lists the predefined metadata types
that you can use with the meta element.
| Metadata Name | Description |
|---|---|
| application name | The name of the web application that the current page is part of |
| author | The name of the author of the current page |
| description | A description of the current page |
| generator | The name of the software that generated the HTML |
| keywords | A set of comma-separated strings that describe the content |
In addition to the five predefined metadata names, you can also use metadata extensions. Go to http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions to see a list of these extensions.
The robots metadata type is very widely used.
It allows the author of an HTML document to specify how the document should be treated by search engines.
For example:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
The three values that most search engines will recognize are
- noindex - don't index this page
- noarchive - don't create archives or cached versions of this page
- nofollow - don't follow links from this page