HTMLMetaElement

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The HTMLMetaElement interface contains descriptive metadata about a document provided in HTML as <meta> elements. This interface inherits all of the properties and methods described in the HTMLElement interface.

EventTarget Node Element HTMLElement HTMLMetaElement

Instance properties

Inherits properties from its parent, HTMLElement.

<meta#charset>

The character encoding for a HTML document.

HTMLMetaElement.content

The 'value' part of the name-value pairs of the document metadata.

HTMLMetaElement.httpEquiv

The name of the pragma directive, the HTTP response header, for a document.

HTMLMetaElement.media

The media context for a theme-color metadata property.

HTMLMetaElement.name

The 'name' part of the name-value pairs defining the named metadata of a document.

HTMLMetaElement.scheme

Defines the scheme of the value in the HTMLMetaElement.content attribute. This is deprecated and should not be used on new web pages.

Instance methods

No specific method; inherits methods from its parent, HTMLElement.

Examples

The following two examples show a general approach to using the HTMLMetaElement interface. For specific examples, see the pages for the individual properties as described in the Instance properties section above.

Setting the page description metadata

The following example creates a new <meta> element with a name attribute set to description. The content attribute sets a description of the document and is appended to the document <head>:

js
const meta = document.createElement("meta");
meta.name = "description";
meta.content =
  "The <meta> element can be used to provide document metadata in terms of name-value pairs, with the name attribute giving the metadata name, and the content attribute giving the value.";
document.head.appendChild(meta);

Setting the viewport metadata

The following example shows how to create a new <meta> element with a name attribute set to viewport. The content attribute sets the viewport size and is appended to the document <head>:

js
const meta = document.createElement("meta");
meta.name = "viewport";
meta.content = "width=device-width, initial-scale=1";
document.head.appendChild(meta);

For more information on setting the viewport, see <meta name="viewport">.