What is the purpose of using the meta viewport tag in HTML when designing a responsive web component? How does this tag help ensure that the component is properly displayed on a variety of screen sizes and devices?
The meta viewport instructs the browser on how to adjust it's dimensions and contents to fit the device's width.
This is because when the page loads, the browser would by default want to load the original size but this would be too big on some screens. That is where the meta tag comes in.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
The attribute width, instructs the browser to set the width to the width of the device and 'initial-scale' sets the zoom to level 1