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HTML How to Make a Website HTML First Use HTML Elements

Posted by Daniel Felling
Daniel Felling
549 Points

what is a meta tag?

trying to set the character set using a meta tag

index.html 
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>meta</head>
  <body></body>
</html>

3 Answers

David Finley
David Finley
18,742 Points
David Finley
David Finley
18,742 Points

A meta tag is a special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices.

Jose Mendoza
seal-mask
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree seal-36
Jose Mendoza
UX Design Techdegree Graduate 19,788 Points
Jose Mendoza
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree seal-36
Jose Mendoza
UX Design Techdegree Graduate 19,788 Points

David couldn't have said it any better!

On the code challenge part, you have to add an actual meta tag inside of the head tag. Following the meta tag is the "charset" which is then given the value "utf-8"

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
  </head>

  <body></body>
</html>
Rasbin Rijal
PLUS
Rasbin Rijal
Courses Plus Student 10,864 Points
Rasbin Rijal
Rasbin Rijal
Courses Plus Student 10,864 Points

Metadata is data (information) about data.

Hi Daniel Felling ,

The <meta> tag provides metadata about the HTML document. Metadata will not be displayed on the page, but will be machine parsable.

Meta elements are typically used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata.

The metadata can be used by browsers (how to display content or reload page), search engines (keywords), or other web services.

Note: <meta> tags always go inside the <head> element.

Note: Metadata is always passed as name/value pairs.

Note: The content attribute MUST be defined if the name or the http-equiv attribute is defined. If none of these are defined, the content attribute CANNOT be defined.

You can also see http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ as a reliable source to find out about more tags like meta.

Reference: w3schools.com