With the <META> tag you can place notes in your code that explain who did the authoring and even what program you used to create your site with. This is important if you have a page that has little or no text based content. For example, if you use frames then you have a control page that has nothing more then links to the pages that are going to be in the frames. Another example would be an image-heavy page. Whatever the reason the <META> tag can help.

First off is the 'name' attribute. This allows you to set up interesting system settings for the web page. It allows you to set a properties' name. For example:

<META name="author">

Now you need to set the value for the <META name> with the content attribute.

<META name="author"
            content="John Doe">

The <META> tag has now declared the author to be John Doe.

You can also set the language of the name with a special attribute called 'lang'. This tells the computer how to pronounce the name. This helps anybody who uses a language synthesizer attached to his or her computer that may read back this information. The tag would be written like so:

<META name="author"
            lang="de"
            content="Johann Bach">

Now the synthesizer knows that the name should be pronounced using German. Another feature of the <META> tag is the ability to declare what program you used to create your code.

<META name="generator"
            content="notepad">

So, go ahead and brag about what text editor you used to generate the code. :-) However, the most important thing that a <META> tag can do is help you out with your search engine rankings.

Head on to:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Labeling Your Pages
Part 3: Keywords and Descriptions
Part 4: The 'HTTP-EQUIV' attribute
HTML Command Reference