Stacy Harrison

@stasquatch

The head tag

2021-06-03

Quick look

Required?sort of?
Common attributestypically none
Common arianone allowed

Summary

The head tag is where metadata about the page will go, such as page title, stylesheet links, and SEO information. Outside of your typical HTML webpage, the head tag should not be used for iframe, srcdoc, or email content. This blog entry will only be covering head as it's used in typical web development.

Typical children of the head tag include:

  • title
  • base
  • link
  • style
  • meta
  • script
  • noscript
  • template

While it's not strictly required, it's good practice to include it. If you omit the tag, browsers will usually insert it for you. Because browsers can have different behavior, you may get unexpected side effects relying on this implementation.

head must be the first child of the html tag (body being the second child).

Attributes

In previous specs, the profile attribute could be used. This has been removed in HTML5.

Global attributes

Usage

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    …
  </head>
  <body>
    …
  </body>
</html>

Note: … denotes miscellaneous HTML, removed for brevity.

Links

MDN: The head tag