HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Examples
<!-- Use of the meta element to assist document indexing -->
<meta name="keywords" content="html, meta element, meta">
<meta name="description" content="This is a simple example of the meta
element with a fake description for the page.">
<!-- Use of the meta element to implement client-pull to automatically
load a page using XHTML syntax -->
<meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="3;URL='http://www.pint.com/'" />
<!-- Use of the meta element to add rating information -->
<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content="(PICS-1.1
'http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html'
1 gen true comment 'RSACi North America
Server' by 'webmaster@democompany.com'
for 'http://www.democompany.com' on
'1999.05.26T13:05-0500'
r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 1))">
<!-- user defined use of meta element -->
<meta name="SiteContentID" content="123asdasa1324a">
<!-- Traditional Charset and Content-Type setting -->
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<!-- HTML5 charset example -->
<meta charset="utf-8">
Compatibility
HTML 2, 3.2, 4, 4.01, 5
XHTML 1.0, 1.1, Basic
Firefox 1+, Internet Explorer 2+,
Netscape 1.1+, Opera 4+, Safari 1+
Notes
• The
meta
element can occur only in the
head
element. It can be defined multiple
times.
• As an empty element under XHTML, or when using XML-style syntax for HTML5,
a trailing slash is required for this element:
<meta />
.
• A common use of the
meta
element is to set information for indexing tools, such as
search engines. Common values for the
name
attribute when performing this
function include
author
,
description
, and
keywords
; other attributes also might
be possible.
• The
http-equiv
attribute is often used to create a document that automatically
loads another document after a set time. This is called
client-pull
. An example of a
client-pull
meta
element is
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;URL='
nextpage.html'">
. Note that the
content
attribute contains two values: the first
is the number of seconds to wait, and the second is the identifier URL and the URL
to load after the specified time.
