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Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS
tip
If you aren’t going to use the <meta> tag and still want the best possible design so your site can be easily found online, ensure that the first paragraph of text on your home page contains a meaningful description of its contents. Because some of the Web index systems only grab the first few sentences, you must carefully craft them so that people can find your information when they search with the various tools listed in this chapter. In particular, your first <h1> headline is important!
Other uses for the <meta> tag The <meta> tag actually turns out to be a general purpose HTML tag that is used for a wide variety of things. Want your page to flip to another after a few seconds? The <meta> tag can do that, as this snippet from Paul Myers’ TalkBiz site (http://www.talkbiz.com/) demonstrates: <meta http-equiv=”refresh”
content=”0;url=http://www.talkbiznews.com/” />
As quickly as possible (after zero seconds), the site’s new home page replaces the current page on the screen. Another way to specify the same functionality is a bit easier to read. It looks like this: <meta name=”refresh” content=”0”
url=”http://www.talkbiznews.com/” />
The new format of using three attributes—not two—is nicer in my view because it’s more obvi ous which is a delay factor and which is the target URL. Here is another example. Want to have your page automatically refresh every 30 seconds? Substitute 30 for 0, as shown in the following: <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”30” />
For example, such frequent refreshes are perfect for Webcam sites! News organizations also use this approach with slightly longer timeouts (that is, the amount of time between when you load the page and when it’s refreshed). Here’s how The Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsj.com/) does it: <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”600” />
Every 600 seconds (five minutes), the page automatically reloads.
Content rating with PICS Another <meta> value is used to detail the type of material included on a site using the con voluted PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) rating information. In late 1996, one of the most hotly argued topics was the quality and appropriateness of content on the Internet.