what does meta mean?

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what does meta mean?

in dreamweaver it has meta tags.

isaac

7:09 am on Sep 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

in dreamweaver i start a new document expecting it to be blank and under head this comes up:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

what does it mean? i know quite a lot of code but i am still fairly new to this.
any help would be greatly appreciated.
thankyou! :)

lucy24

9:45 am on Sep 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

It means it's an html document. Or, to be precise, an xhtml document. (The closing slash says so.) Nothing is ever truly blank. In fact there should be several more lines, because they don't expect you to enter the DTD manually do they?

isaac

10:55 am on Sep 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

so what is the importance of it?

Leosghost

11:03 am on Sep 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

search for..
"what are meta tags for"
leave the quotes on..

phranque

4:58 pm on Sep 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

the purpose of this meta tag is to provide Content-Type information for cached pages, for example, where the originally provided HTTP Response header may be long gone.

it also specifies the encoding use for the document's character set is 8-bit Unicode.

tedster

7:03 am on Sep 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

Literally "meta" means a concept that is an abstraction from another concept. So in psychology, meta-memory is remembering if you actually remember something. In an html document meta data is data ABOUT the document's data, so a "meta tag" is a short bit of information about the the html document. That's why any meta tag should always be in the <head> area.

There are many meta tags, and only few have influence on either the major web search engines or on browsers. Other meta tags have custom purposes that may be used internally by the business, or some specific business. Even Google offers a custom site verification meta tag.

isaac

7:30 am on Sep 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

Oh ok thakyou!

phranque

11:44 am on Sep 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

welcome to WebmasterWorld, isaac!

catsmiley

6:57 pm on Sep 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

Meta in any language and HTML is no exception is the raw data that defines a page. What you are saying to the computer or reader is "I am a Letter", "This letter is about me moving house", and in HTMLs case these are some key words "united,kingdom,midlands,London,moving,house".

They are set in the header or rather <head> </head> tags.

Examples:
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> - Tells the browser that this is written in HTML using that character set.
<meta name="description" content=" This letter is about me moving house"/> - Description Meta
<meta name="keyword" content="united,kingdom,midlands,London,moving,house"/> - Keyword Meta

There are more Meta tags than this of course.

The reason why we use them is because of Spiders from Google can pick up on the Meta tags. So your title or rather <title>I am a Letter</title> becomes the title in the search engine and then the description is from the meta along with the keywords.

Read more: [wiki.answers.com...]

Leosghost

7:40 pm on Sep 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

The reason why we use them is because of Spiders from Google can pick up on the Meta tags.

You are aware that meta tags existed before Google did ?

becomes the title in the search engine and then the description is from the meta along with the keywords.

That's incorrect, the description in SERPS does not come from the "meta description" tag..