A <META> tag will contain a name-value pair stored in two separate HTML tag attributes. The content property relates to the value part of that name-value pair. The name property is contained in a NAME="..." HTML tag attribute.

The web server hides additional information in header records that the client browser uses but which are invisible to the user and generally hard to access from JavaScript. The <META> tags support an HTTP-EQUIV="..." HTML tag attribute which although encoded as part of the document source, will behave as if it were a server response header value. This is also used in conjunction with the content property as an alternative way of forming a name-value pair.