A Basic Example: the Meta Tag

Meta tags provide a relatively simple exercise for integrating HTML and writing practice, and since they are placed at the beginning of a web page—in the head section (usually after the title tags)—they can be discussed as part of the basic "page anatomy." According to Musciano and Kennedy, the tags "have the primary function of supporting document automation and interacting with the web server itself and document-generation tools" (223). In other words, meta tags are used to provide information to both server and browser about the nature of the page on which they occur. Although meta tags have several possible attributes, name and content are the most significant ones for use in a writing class. The name attribute has no predefined values; Musciano and Kennedy suggest that "in general you are free to use any name that makes sense to you and other readers of your source document" (224). The three values I would suggest for writing classes are author, keywords, and description.

All values for the name attribute require another attribute as well: content. Musciano and Kennedy explain that the content attribute "provides the value of the name/value pair. It can be any valid string, enclosed in quotes, if it contains spaces" (224). Thus the content attribute provides the information implied by the name attribute values (i.e., author, keywords, and description).

For More Information on Meta Tags...

Citation Format: Batschelet, Margaret. "Learning To Love the Code: HTML As a Tool in the Writing Classroom." The Writing Instructor. 2004. http://www.writinginstructor.org/files/batschelet/ (Date Accessed).
Review Process: Margaret Batschelet's hypertext was accepted for publication following blind, peer review.