HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
A few other important head elements need to be discussed. he
title
element
(which has already made several appearances in these pages), the
style
ele-
ment, and the
base
element are described in the following sections along with
one of the most useful elements in the document head—the comment.
Comments
he site visitors don't see them, and the robots ignore them, but they will be
of enormous help to the next web author or programmer who has to work on
the page. Comments can even be placed between the opening
html
and
head
elements. his is a good place to add version, authorship, and update informa-
tion. It is also a good place to document any dependencies on special resources
and provide notes explaining why some coding is diferent than what would be
expected.
he
title
Element
It is easy to understand its purpose: to provide the document's title. here can
be only one
title
element in a document, and it is required. he document
title can be diferent from the title of the page established by a level-one head-
ing or other prominent element. his happens when the current page repre-
sents only a section of a larger document or when the
title
element combines
the general and the speciic.
he irst and most important guideline for writing good titles is to put the
most important words irst. he content of the
title
element is used not only
for the title of the window that presents the document as a web page in the
browser. It is also the label used for tabbed browser windows. hese tab labels
can get very short if the user has many open at once. he document title also is
used for shortcuts, favorites, bookmarks, and sitemaps. Search engine com-
panies pay special attention to the words at the beginning of the title because
people naturally search through indexes and catalogs by title in that manner.
It's not necessary to have your domain name in the
title
element of every
page on your site. Robots know what site they are scanning, and the page
presumably has meta description information and clear page and section
headings. herefore, putting the domain name in the title matters only if this
will assist your site's human visitors. You should certainly have the formal
name of your organization in the title of the home page, especially if it is not
obvious from the domain name. For example, the home page located at
http://example.org/ might have this title:
<title>The Example Organization</title>
