Early syntax-directed compiler-compiler, used for translating one high-level language to another. Versions: META II, META-3. ["META 5: A Tool to Manipulate Strings of Data", D.K. Oppenheim et al, Proc 21st Natl Conf, ACM 1966]. [Sammet 1969, p. 638]. (1995-01-23)

<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