The Document Header
The document header describes the various properties of the document, including its title, position within the Web, and relationship with other documents. Most of the data contained within the document header is never actually rendered as content visible to the user.
The <head> Tag
The <head>
tag serves to encapsulate other header
tags. Place it at the beginning of your document, just after the
<html>
tag and before the
<body>
or
<frameset>
tag. Both the
<head>
tag and its corresponding ending
</head>
tag can be unambiguously inferred by
the browser and so can be safely omitted from an HTML, but not an
XHTML, document. We encourage you to include them in all your
documents, since they promote readability and support document
automation.
The <head>
tag may contain a number of other
tags that help define and manage the document’s
content. These include, in any order of appearance:
<base>
, <isindex>
,
<link>
, <meta>
,
<nextid>
, <object>
,
<script>
, <style>
,
and <title>
.
The dir and lang attributes
As we discussed in the sections about the
<html>
tag attributes,
dir
and lang
help extend HTML and XHTML to an
international audience. [Section 3.6.1.1] [Section 3.6.1.2]
The profile attribute
Often, the header of a document
contains a number of <meta>
tags used to convey additional information about the document to the browser. ...
Get HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.