meta element

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)