<meta>: The metadata element

The <meta> HTML element represents metadata that cannot be represented by other meta-related elements, such as <base>, <link>, <script>, <style>, or <title>.

The type of metadata provided by the <meta> element can be one of the following:

• If the name attribute is set, the <meta> element provides document-level metadata that applies to the whole page.
• If the http-equiv attribute is set, the <meta> element acts as a pragma directive to simulate directives that could otherwise be given by an HTTP header.
• If the charset attribute is set, the <meta> element is a charset declaration, giving the character encoding in which the document is encoded.
• If the itemprop attribute is set, the <meta> element provides user-defined metadata.

Attributes

This element includes the global attributes.

charset

This attribute declares the document's character encoding. If the attribute is present, its value must be an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "utf-8", because UTF-8 is the only valid encoding for HTML5 documents. <meta> elements which declare a character encoding must be located entirely within the first 1024 bytes of the document.

content

This attribute contains the value for the http-equiv or name attribute, depending on which is used.

http-equiv

Defines a pragma directive, which are instructions for the browser for processing the document. The attribute's name is short for http-equivalent because the allowed values are names of equivalent HTTP headers.

media

The media attribute defines which media the theme color defined in the content attribute should be applied to. Its value is a media query, which defaults to all if the attribute is missing. This attribute is only relevant when the element's name attribute is set to theme-color. Otherwise, it has no effect, and should not be included.

name

The name and content attributes can be used together to provide document metadata in terms of name-value pairs, with the name attribute giving the metadata name, and the content attribute giving the value.

Examples

Setting a meta description

The following <meta> tag provides a description as metadata for the web page:

<meta
  name="description"
  content="The HTML reference describes all elements and attributes of HTML, including global attributes that apply to all elements." />

Setting a page redirect

The following example uses http-equiv="refresh" to direct the browser to perform a redirect. The content="3;url=https://www.mozilla.org" attribute will redirect page to https://www.mozilla.org after 3 seconds:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;url=https://www.mozilla.org" />

Technical summary

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• Standard metadata names
• Learn: <meta>
• The viewport meta tag