What is a meta element?

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An HTML meta element is where an item of metadata about a Web page is stored. A Web page may contain many meta elements to represent any number of metadata items, but these records are not normally displayed by your Web browser. They are mainly intended to be read by search engines and other metadata tools.

The two key parts of a meta element are its name attribute, which is a label for the type of metadata it contains, and the content attribute, which contains the detail of the item. For instance, a copyright statement says who the copyright belongs to and would be recorded as below in HTML.

<meta name="copyright"
  content="Copyright &copy; 2004 Metacentric Internet Limited.">
      

There is no single standard for recording metadata, but it is better to follow a standard and declare what it is. A common way of declaring a metadata scheme is to prefix the name attribute with an identifier, like DC for the Dublin Core scheme, which also has its own label for copyright information (below in XHTML).

<meta name="DC.Rights"
  content="Copyright &copy; 2004 Metacentric Internet Limited." />
      

A meta element may also have a scheme attribute that states the standard format in which the detail is recorded. This helps avoid any confusion between American and British date formats, for instance. A date may be encoded according to the World Wide Web Consortium's Date Time Format (W3CDTF), as below.

<meta name="DC.Date.created" scheme="W3CDTF" content="2004-04-14" />
      

See also:

• What is a link element?
• What is metadata?
• What is an HTML element?
• What is an HTML attribute?