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Meta Information

In addition to defining a title, you can also supply additional meta data or information about your document. Meta data is defined using the <META> element. The most common use of <META> is to define keywords and a description of your document for search engines, and to define your PICS (platform for internet content selection) rating. A PICS rating is most often used to provide a rating for your page similar to how a movie is rated (eg., does your page contain any sexual or violent content).

If you want to have your pages indexed by various search engines, you should add 2 meta elements that provide a description and keywords for your page:

  <META NAME="keywords" 
           CONTENT="DHTML, HTML, Authoring, Web, 4.0, CSS">
  <META NAME="description" 
           CONTENT="This page is all about creating web pages">

In addition, you can register your page with an organization, RSAC, that provides you with a META tag that represents the type of content on your site. In our opening page, we have a META tag defining our rating as follows:

  <META http-equiv="PICS-Label" 
       content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" 
         l gen true comment "RSACi North America Server" 
         by "scotti@insideDHTML.com" for "http://www.insideDHTML.com" 
         on "1997.07.17T13:27-0800" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>

This information can be used by a browser or tool to determine whether the content is appropriate for different audiences (eg., preventing minors from accessing violent or pornographic web sites). Internet Explorer 4.0 allows you to define the types of content that are viewable based on these ratings.

Head Elements - Specifying Link Relationships...