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What’s in the head? Metadata in HTML

The head of an HTML document is the part that is not displayed in the web browser when the page is loaded. It contains information such as the page <title>, links to CSS (if you choose to style your HTML content with CSS), links to custom favicons, and other metadata (data about the HTML, such as the author, and page title that describe the document.) In this article, we'll cover all of the above and more in order to give you a good basis for working with markup.

What is the HTML head?

Let's consider this HTML document:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>My test page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is my page</p>
</body>
</html>

The HTML head is the contents of the <head> element — unlike the contents of the <body> element (which are displayed on the page when loaded in a browser), the head's content is not displayed on the page. Instead, the head's job is to contain metadata about the document. In the above example, the head is small:

<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>My test page</title>
</head>

In larger pages, however, the head can get quite full. Try going to some of your favorite websites and use the developer tools to check out their head contents. Our aim here is not to show you how to use everything that can possibly be put in the head, but rather to teach you how to use the major elements that you'll want to include in the head, and give you some familiarity. Let's get started.

Metadata: the meta element

Metadata is data that describes data, and HTML has an "official" way of adding metadata to a document — the <meta> element. Of course, the other stuff we are talking about in this article could also be thought of as metadata too. There are a lot of different types of <meta> elements that can be included in your page's <head>, but we won't try to explain them all at this stage, as it would just get too confusing. Instead, we'll explain a few things that you might commonly see, just to give you an idea.

Specifying your document's character encoding

In the example we saw above, this line was included:

<meta charset="utf-8" />

This element simply specifies the document's character encoding — the character set that the document is permitted to use. The utf-8 is a universal character set that includes pretty much any character from any human language. This means that your web page will be able to handle displaying any language; it's, therefore, a good idea to set this on every web page you create! For example, your page could handle English and Japanese just fine:

If you set your character encoding to ISO-8859-1, for example (the character set for the Latin alphabet), your page rendering may appear all messed up:


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