HTML Head

Examples

The title of a document
The title information inside a head element is not displayed in the browser window.

One target for all links
This example demonstrates how to use the base tag to let all the links on a page have the same target.

The Head Element

The head element contains general information, also called meta-information, about a document. Meta means "information about".

You can say that meta-data means information about data, or meta-information means information about information.

Information Inside the Head Element

The elements inside the head element should not be displayed by a browser.

According to the HTML standard, only a few tags are legal inside the head section. These are: <base>, <link>, <meta>, <title>, <style>, and <script>.

Look at the following illegal construct:

<head>
  <p>This is some text</p>
</head>

In this case the browser has two options:

Display the text because it is inside a paragraph element
Hide the text because it is inside a head element

If you put an HTML element like <h1> or <p> inside a head element like this, most browsers will display it, even if it is illegal.

Should browsers forgive you for errors like this? We don't think so. Others do.

Head Tags:

NN: Netscape, IE: Internet Explorer, W3C: Web Standard

Start Tag	NN	IE	W3C	Purpose
<head>	3.0	3.0	3.2	Defines information about the document
<title>	3.0	3.0	3.2	Defines the document title
<base>	3.0	3.0	3.2	Defines a default reference to external resources
<link>	4.0	3.0	3.2	Defines the relationship between two linked documents
<meta>	3.0	3.0	3.2	Defines meta information

Start Tag	NN	IE	W3C	Purpose
<!doctype>			3.2	Defines the document type. This tag goes before the <html> start tag.

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