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Special Characters
Many special characters can be inserted into web pages. They can be referenced by name or number. They are preceded in the HTML by the & symbol, and end with a semicolon. Longer lists are available, free for downloading on the web. Here are some of the more useful ones:
Example:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Special characters</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>
You must use the <B>< HTML > < /HTML ></B> tag to begin and end any HTML document.
</BODY>
</HTML>
The above line should display this (the bold tags may not work in all browsers):
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Meta Tags
Meta tags contain information about a document; they are placed between the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags. There is no closing tag. This information is not displayed in browser windows.
Meta tags define properties of the document or web site and assign values to those properties. They can determine how easy your web site is to find, because search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo) examine meta tags when looking for matches to queries. The format is quite simple:
For search engines, the most important properties are description and keywords. The description is a short blurb about the site, expressed in plain English sentences. Most search engines only take about the first 25 words - anything more is cut off. The keywords is what words or short phrases you expect people to use to find a web site like yours. Search engines will index your site based on these words or phrases. Don't bother putting in more than about 20 (more will generally be ignored), and put the most important first. Each tag defines a single property and its value. The following example is the meta tags for a web page designer's web site:
Look at the results of a Google search for "web page designers russia":
Notice that all the words in my query are in bold in the search results. You can see the word Description:, third line from the bottom. This "description" doesn't exactly correspond to any meta tag. Search engines return results based on complex rules; the results depend on what you search for, what the meta tags contain, and how that search engine indexes data. Here are the meta tags in the HTML (in part):
You don't need meta tags on every single page - that is a waste of time and disk space. Put them on your index page. Click here if you don't know what an index file is.
Back to ContentsAutomatic Redirection or Page Loading - also called client-pull
Meta tags can be used to create a document that automatically loads another document after a set time. This is commonly used in site redirection: when a page changes URLs, the old site has a page redirecting users to the new page. We've all seen pages like:
Click here for a sample of two files that will bounce you back and forth. The HTML for both files is below.
First File:
Second File:
Note the absence of name= in the meta tag, and the use instead of http-equiv="refresh". The content tag has two values, a number indicating the number of seconds to wait (5), then a semicolon, then the URL of the page to jump to (redir01.html), enclosed in single quotes.
You could drive people insane, putting them in an infinite loop...
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