Building web pages with XHTML 1.1

You can use any number of meta elements inside your head element to describe several kinds of information about the document.

Each meta element names some property of the page and specifies a value for that property. In some cases, the name attribute names the property and the content attribute gives the value for the property. Some properties are defined by the HTTP protocol; in that case, the http-equiv attribute names the property and the content attribute gives its value.

Here is the content model:

element meta
{ attribute xml:lang { text }?,
  attribute http-equiv { xsd:NMTOKEN },
  attribute name { xsd: NMTOKEN },
  attribute content { text }?,
  attribute scheme { text }?,
  empty
}

The property names and values allowed here are many. Here are just a few examples. The first example gives the author's name, and tags the name as French.

<meta name="author" content="Pierre de Beaumarchais" xml:lang="fr">

The next example defines a few keywords to help search engines determine what's on the page:

<meta name='keywords' content='grackles, icterids, spackle'>

Here is an example of the use of the http-equiv attribute to define the document type as HTML and the character set as US ASCII:

<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=US-ASCII'>

For a detailed discussion of the meta element, refer to the relevant section of the HTML 4.01 specification.