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	Mysteries of the <META> Tag
Being an account of that most arcane of HTML tags, <META>.

The <META> tag, while not vital to the functioning of any page, is highly important. It holds information on the page itself, and tells its secrets to the wandering web spiders and other electronic minions who report on thy pages. To gain true notice on the net, a <META> tag is a necessity. In this lesson in the dark arts of HTML scripting we will explore it and its uses.

The tag must be invoked within the head of your document. To place it anywhere else is to place thyself and your document at the mercies of the browser. Where it appears in the head does not matter, only that it follows the usual rules. A <META> tag is not closed.

So what does one do inside the tag to make it powerful? To unleash its power thou must shape its insides. There are three basic ways to shape: HTTP-EQUIV, NAME, and CONTENT. We will primarily concern ourself with the first two of these.

HTTP-EQUIV is used to tell some basic properties of the document. It can be further shaped into a variety of forms, detailing many aspects. Here are three of the more important usages:

What do they mean? Patience apprentice! Content-Type deals with the type of document overall. In this case it says that the document is text in HTML formate, using the standard latin (English characters) set. This can be changed so that the file instead displays in Japanese, Cyrillic, or many other languages.

Content-Language tells what language set the document is printed in. This particular instance says that the document is written in the United States version of the English language.

Window-target sets the base target for all links. _top means that all documents will be loaded at the top of the tree, breaking free of any imprisoning frames with the first link clicked.

These three tags can be safely pasted directly into thy document, assuming thy pages are in English and thou are not using frames. The next set we will deal with however will require modifications on thy part to work accurately.

NAME deals primarily with the information inside, and describes it. Our three example uses are:

Author is self explanatorily. It is the person or persons who wrote the document.

Description is the short blurb explaining the content of the page. It should generally either be an expansion of the document title or a supplement for it.

Finally, Keywords are words that describe thy document. These are often used by search engines to decide what thy page is really about. It is a good idea to include multiple versions of a word, as well as common misspellings. Do NOT repeat words, as spiders will penalize those they believe to be tricking them.

These 6 uses put thee well on the path to understanding and using this tag, but there are still more tricks it is capable of. The first of these is client pull.

The first part of CONTENT (15;) is the number of seconds before the address in the second part (URL=http://myplace.com/thatpage.html) is loaded. This trick is often used to automatically redirect visitors to another page, as well as creating slide shows when linked into chains.

The finial use we shall talk of today is in the rating of the content of thy page. Instead of explaining this use, I direct thee to the two groups that maintain the standards. The first is the PICS standard, found at http://www.w3.org/PICS/ and the second standard is to be found at http://www.rsac.org/homepage.asp. There is no harm in registering with both if there is a chance thy content may be inappropriate for some audiences.

This concludes today's lesson in the dark art of HTML scripting. Go forth apprentice, and invoke the mighty <META> to serve thee!

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