Overview
HTML <meta> tags are not displayed on the page, but tell the browser, search engines, and various external services information about the document.
The placement in the head of the document is further explored when discussing the Advanced Page Setup.
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="description" content="Free Web Tutorials">
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, SQL">
<meta name="author" content="1SMARTchicken">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">Note
The <meta> charset should be considered mandatory (it isn’t) as it specifies the character encoding for the HTML document. Similarly, the <meta> name=”viewport” should always be present as it tells the browser to display the page at the width of the device and to scale it to 100% on the initial view. So, not zoomed is what that means.
Other Meta Tags
In the above “description”, “keywords”, and “author” are self explanatory. But here are some examples of other <meta> tags and what they do.
<!-- refreshes the page every 30 seconds -->
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30">
<!-- shows the last time the document content was revised -->
<meta name = "revised" content = "1SMARTchicken, 11/22/2022">
<!-- automatically redirects the page to a specified URL after 5 seconds -->
<meta http-equiv = "refresh" content = "5; url = https://www.1smartchicken.com">
<!-- set a user cookie -->
<meta http-equiv = "cookie" content = "userid = abc123; expires = Wednesday, 07-Dec-2022 23:59:59 GMT;">Note
This is by no means an exhaustive list. This is just a few addition <meta> tags that are commonly used. See a more complete Meta Tags list.
HTML Notes:
- In our HTML section the term “tag” and “element” are often used interchangeably to refer to both the tag used to create a page element and the element created by the tag (<p> tag = <p> element = paragraph on the page)
- HTML5 is not case sensitive; so <P> is the same as <p>, <H1> is the same as <h1>
- Global attributes can be used with all HTML tags and are therefore not mentioned on every tag page
- To write clean, readable HTML code, it is best to use indentation whereas elements within elements are indented (tabbed or spaces) to create something that looks like a project outline
- The browser will automatically remove any extra spaces and lines in your HTML code when the page is displayed
- Double quotes or single quotes can be used around HTML attribute values, but when the attribute value itself contains one form of quote, it will be necessary to use the other around the attribute
We’d like to acknowledge that we learned a great deal of our coding from W3Schools and TutorialsPoint, borrowing heavily from their teaching process and excellent code examples. We highly recommend both sites to deepen your experience, and further your coding journey. We’re just hitting the basics here at 1SMARTchicken.