NIPMN Meta Specifications


The NIPMN search engine agent uses meta tags in your HTML document to get information about the document so that users can find your pages quickly. This document describes the meta tags that are currently supported by the NIPMN search engine agent.

All tags follow this format

<META name="tagname" content="value">

and are implemented in an HTML document within the <HEAD> tag. For example, here is a document which uses the keyword and state (North Carolina) meta tags:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META name="state" content="NC">
<META name="keywords" content="cotton, tarnished plant bug">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
This page describes a common pest of cotton.
</BODY>
</HTML>

Currently supported tags

Name Description Example Notes
state the state to which the information applies "NC" notes
nipmnsubject* colon-delimited categorization of document content according to the NIPMN categorized indices "crops:cotton:pests:life cycles" notes
keywords a list of keywords describing the document "cotton, tarnished plant bug" notes
description brief description of the document "Illustrated life cycle of tarnished plant bug." notes
author the author of the information on the page "John Q. Doe" notes
pestclass the class of pest by taxonomic type "nematode" notes
pest the pest the information in the document refers to "Tarnished Plant Bug" notes
expires the date the information in the document expires "02-Mar-1996" notes
robots tells web robots whether or not to index a page or follow links on that page "index,nofollow" notes
nipmn extensible tag for the NIPMN search agent "noindex" notes

*The nipmnsubject tag may be replaced by a category tag for compatibility with new search engine tools. If that happens, we will make simple search/replace scripts available for a variety of computer platforms to help you update your site.

The keywords, description and author tags will also be used by commercial search engines when indexing your documents.

Please direct comments to John VanDyk.


Last updated 10/20/98