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Home Page : HTML and JavaScript : Meta tags
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Meta tags provide a means of adding extra information about your HTML document. This is information that either your browser might be able to make use of or typically to provide additional information to search engines.
There are two types of meta tags:
<META NAME="tag" CONTENT="data">
and
<META HTTP-EQUIV="tag" CONTENT="data">
Information provided by HTTP-EQUIV is passed to the browser before it
receives the rest of the document. It provides information that could therefore
affect how the browser handles the document. Both styles of meta tags must be
positioned within the head of the document (i.e. between the <HEAD>
and </HEAD> tags).
| Meta Name | Description | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Author | The name of the author of the page. | ||||||||
| Copyright | Allows a copyright statement to be embedded. | ||||||||
| Description | A short description of the page. Used by search engines as a summary description of the page. | ||||||||
| Generator | The name of the tool used to create the page. (Unsure how useful this is to web-authors.) | ||||||||
| Keywords | Used by search engines to index the page. Use to specify keywords of relevance to the page. | ||||||||
| Robots | Gives instructions to web-robots (also called web bots). Be aware
that the web-bot is free to ignore it! The CONTENT
portion should be a comma separated list of one or more of the
following:
For example to prevent a page from being indexed: <META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="NOINDEX"> these tags can be combined so, for example, to prevent a page from being indexed and any links followed: <META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> |
HTTP-EQUIV tags that are not recognised (i.e. supported) by the browser will be silently ignored (i.e. the viewer will not see an error). So you can use HTTP-EQUIV tags safely without worrying too much whether a given browser will support them.
| Meta Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Content-Type | Specifies the character encoding scheme used for the document. A
semicolon (;) can be used to combine values. Typical values:
CONTENT="text/html"
CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
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| Expires | For caching purposes this stages when the document
expires. Web robots may delete expired documents from their indexes
or may schedule a revisit. The format is:
CONTENT="Weekday, DD MMM YYYY HH:MM:SS TIMEZONE" For example: "Thu, 7 Feb 2002 13:00:00 GMT" An invalid value (such as 0) denotes 'now', forcing a check on each visit. |
| Page-Enter | Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5+ only.
Specifies how the page should appear to replace the previous page in the browser. For a summary of the transitions available see: http://www.jansfreeware.com/articles/ie-page-transitions.html. The Microsoft documentation on page transitions can be viewed at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/filter/reference/reference.asp, but be aware that this concentrates on applying transitions to styles. An interactive demonstration of filters and transitions can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/samples/author/dhtml/dxtidemo/dxtidemo.htm . |
| Page-Exit | Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5+ only.
Specifies how the page should appear to disappear when the browser moves on to another page. Otherwise the options are the same as for Page-Enter. |
| Pragma | There is only one pragma directive:
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache"> This requests that the page not be cached locally by the browser. |
| Refresh | Tells the browser to wait a specified number of seconds
before loading a new page.
For example to reload the current page after five minutes: CONTENT="600" To load a different page after 5 seconds: CONTENT="5; URL=http://www.cryer.co.uk/index.htm" |
If you find any omissions from this list please e-mail the author.
© Copyright 2004-2008, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved.