The Document <head>
The head of a document is where you say what type of document you're creating
and what language it's created in. At a minimum, an HTML document consists
of a <head> and a <body>, surrounded by <html> elements.
A complete document head will look something like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html lang="en" xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head><title>All about parrots and cute bunny rabbits</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta name="keywords" content="parrots, bunnies, rabbits, bunny rabbits, cute" /> <meta name="description" content="Everything you ever wanted to know about parrots and bunny rabbits (especially cute ones) that you were always afraid to ask" /> </head>
Yikes! What does all that mean? Don't get too frightened. Look closely.
Yeah, some of it's a mess if you don't understand it, but some of it is sort
of self-explanatory. For example, lang="en" means
that the language is English. The xml:lang="en" means
the same thing. It's redundant, and in some ways is not necessary, but it's
there for a reason. Just trust me on that one.
The "meta" elements tell us "meta" information about the
page. Meta information is "information about information." Maybe
that's confusing, but the concept is rather simple when you look at what
the <meta> elements
are doing. These particular elements are just specifying keywords for the
page and giving it a brief description. Notice that <meta> elements
are self-closing in the same way that <img> elements and <hr
/> elements
are.
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