What is metadata for HTML documents?

Question

I’m reading a book about HTML.

Page 19 lists the Categories.

Each element in HTML may or may not be part of a group of elements with similar characteristics.

And then the categories of these groups are listed:

• Metadata content
• Flow content

and a few more categories...

My doubt is in the category Metadata content, which seems to me to be some kind of metadata from an HTML page.

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Doubts

1. I don’t know what metadata means. And I’d like to know what it is metadata in relation to HTML documents?
2. How important these metadata are to a document HTML (web pages)?

Answer 1

Simply put, metadata is data that provides information about other data, or data about data as says wikipedia. If you understand programming you can easily associate this to the concept of arrays with indices semantics.

For example in an image, a data related to that image (size, etc.), can be used to create the information also related to this image, through this any entity can know that the x image has y size.

On a website, or in a document HTML that in principle has as main objective the construction of the skeleton of the website, the idea is the same, enunciate how the page is organized, telling where are the headers, titles, content and so on, using specific keywords for each area of the document. In a word document, or any other word processor does almost the same thing, if not all - XML.

Another example could be tags that you used when creating this question:

html and characteristic-language

I, even before visualizing the question, could know that it is related to html, and seeing the content of the question, I saw "words" in bold, with font larger than the rest of the page, and I was able to know that it was the title, and when I saw the text with regular font located below the title I also knew that it was the content, at the end, when I read, I could prove that it is really related to html.

If the tags were wrong, even though I read the contents (which deals with C), I’d be confused, because, imagine: I came here hoping to find content about html, but I found something different, how I deal with it ?. It would be worse if the question didn’t have any tag, I could clearly see that this is about HTML by what is linked to the title, and why the question is on the main page of the site, but someone browsing the tags HTML would have even found the question ?

Despite example with people, when speaking metatags refers to the digital world.

Answer 2

1. I don’t know what metadata means. And I’d like to know what is metadata in relation to HTML documents?

As it has already been explained what metadata is, I will explain what they are for in HTML documents.

HTML documents can serve a number of different purposes, virtually everything you view on the web, mounted with HTML.

The metadata is in the header of an HTML page and is the first information read about the document. It can bring information such as page title (title), version of the markup language (!DOCTYPE), author of the document (meta name="Author") etc..

2. How important these metadata are to an HTML document (web pages)?

They are very important because the browser and the search tools use this information constantly to improve the user experience, bringing more concise search answers and differentiating the browser tabs by titles and favicons different that represent your website.

Answer 3

I don’t know what metadata means. And I’d like to know what is metadata in relation to HTML documents?

Very briefly, the metadata is used to expose relevant information on your site in a public way and with a standard name tag for each information, for example, if you wanted to expose who is the developer or team that created the site, use this tag:

<meta name="author" content="Edvaldo Farias" /> 

How important these metadata are to an HTML document (web pages)?

It is very important for many services, but the main reason nowadays is related to the search engines of sites like Google, Bing and etc. Metadata helps to identify important information in an easy, fast and standardized way.