The top bit of an 8-bit character, which is on in character values 128--255. Also called high bit, alt bit, or hobbit. Some terminals and consoles (see {space-cadet keyboard}) have a META shift key. Others (including, *mirabile dictu*, keyboards on IBM PC-class machines) have an ALT key. See also bucky bits. Historical note: although in modern usage shaped by a universe of 8-bit bytes the meta bit is invariably hex 80 (octal 0200), things were different on earlier machines with 36 bit words and 9-bit bytes. The MIT and Stanford keyboards (see space-cadet keyboard) generated hex 100 (octal 400) from their meta keys. [Jargon File]

<World-Wide Web> An element, with tag name of "META", expressing meta-data about a given HTML document. HTML standards do not require that documents have META elements; but if META elements occur, they must be inside the document's HEAD element. The META element can be used to identify properties of a document (e.g., author, expiration date, a list of key words, etc.) and assign values to those properties, typically by specifying a NAME attribute (to name the property) and a CONTENT attribute (to assign a value for that property). The HTML 4 specification doesn't standardise particular NAME properties or CONTENT values; but it is conventional to use a "Description" property to convey a short summary of the document, and a "Keywords" property to provide a list of keywords relevant to the document, as in: <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Information from around the world on kumquat farming techniques and current kumquat production and consumption data"> <META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="kumquat, Fortunella"> META elements with HTTP-EQUIV and CONTENT attributes can simulate the effect of HTTP header lines, as in: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Tue, 22 Mar 2000 16:18:35 GMT"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="10; URL=http://foldoc.org/"> Other properties may be application-specific. For example, the {Robots Exclusion (http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots.html)}. standard uses the "robots" property for asserting that the given document should not be indexed by robots, nor should links in it be followed: <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,follow"> (2001-02-07)

META element