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Practical Web Design - Top 15 META Tag Tricks

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META "Pics"

The World Wide Web Consortium provides a site labeling protocol called PICS, which stands for Platform for Internet Content Specification. Many Web filtering software packages use PICS information to decide which sites are family-friendly and which are not. The whole idea can get rather complicated, so instead of my giving you anything "generic," I suggest you visit the PICS site and decide how to proceed for yourself. Or surf to the ICRA (Internet Content Rating Association) site to find out how to "rate" your site for content.

META Generator

This tag is automatically added by many HTML editors such as PageMill, Front Page, and Dreamweaver:

<META NAME="generator" CONTENT="program name and version">

META "Smart Parsing"

"Smart Parsing" is a stealthy, and usually unwelcome, Microsoft invention that has yet to see widespread usage. If in use in any Microsoft application or operating system, it will force chosen words or phrases in your site to link to other sites of Microsoft's choice -- i.e. a user who clicks on the Smart Tagged-word "automobile" will be whisked away to, say, Toyota's Website. If this happens on, for example, a General Motors page, someone in the executive suite won't be happy when it comes to his or her attention.

Although Smart Parsing isn't in current versions of XP or in Internet Explorer 6, it is a feature of Office XP (turned off by default) and may appear in future versions of XP, IE, and other Microsoft products. It's uncomfortably similar to TopText, a nasty and well-known type of spyware (read more about spyware in my SitePoint article of Sept. 20, 2002, AdWare and Under-ware: The Definitive Guide). In general, this kind of thing is a bad idea, possibly illegal, and definitely intrusive and unwanted.

As I write this (November 2002), Microsoft has contracted with 25 companies, including ESPN, C|Net, MSNBC, FedEx, and others to use Smart Tag technology to link to selected words and phrases in any Web document that can be invaded by Smart Tags. If you're like me, you'll link to ESPN or FedEx only if you want to link to them, and not allow Microsoft to add links to your page without your approval. Use this tag to keep Smart Tags out of your pages, and remember, this META tag must appear on every page of your site:

<META NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" CONTENT="true">

Let MetaGen Do It For You

Matt Mickiewicz's MetaGen page automatically generates basic META tags for your page. Another fine resource from the wizards at SitePoint -- give it a whirl!