Supporting Document Automation
Two additional header tags have the primary functions of supporting document automation and interacting with the web server itself and with document-generation tools.
The <meta> Header Element
Given the rich set of header tags for defining a
document and its relationship with others that go unused by most
authors, you'd think we'd all be satisfied. But no, there's always
someone with special needs. These authors want to be able to give even
more information about their precious documents—information that
browsers, readers of the source, or document-indexing tools might use.
The <meta> tag is for those
of you who need to go beyond the beyond.
The <meta> tag belongs
in the document header and has no content. Instead, attributes of the
tag define name/value pairs that associate the document. In certain
cases, the web server serving the document uses these values to
further define the document content type to the browser.
The name attribute
The name attribute supplies
the name of the name/value pair defined by the <meta> tag. Neither the HTML nor the
XHTML standard specifies any predefined <meta> names. In general, you are
free to use any name that makes sense to you and other readers of
your source document.
One commonly used name ...
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