HTML The Definitive Guide (25 page)

Chapter 3

Anatomy of an HTML

Document

3.6 The Document Header

The HTML 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 are never actually rendered as content visible to the user.

3.6.1 The Tag

The tag serves to encapsulate the other header tags. Place it at the beginning of your document, just after the tag and before the or tag. Both the tag and its corresponding ending can be unambiguously inferred by the browser and so can be safely omitted from the document. Nonetheless, we do encourage you to include them in your documents, since it promotes readability and better supports document automation.

Function:

Defines the document header

Attributes:

DIRLANGPROFILE

End tag:

; rarely omitted

Contains:

head_content

Used in:

html_tag

The tag may contain a number of other tags that help define and manage the document's content. These include, in any order of appearance: , , , , ,