The head element holds information about the document; the body element holds the actual content that makes up the document.
The Head Element
The Head element can enclose a number of elements of which the most important are listed below. (HTML 4.01 version is shown - if XHTML is used then elements without closing tags should end with a space then forward slash)
The title element. This takes the form <title="The title of my document"> It has no closing tag. This element is often used by search engines and may show on search results.
The link element. This defines the relationship between this document and other documents. It has no closing tag. This element is used to link to external style sheets and takes the form <link rel="stylesheet" href="my_stylesheet.css" type="text/css">
The script element. This is used to place script, such as JavaScript, within a document. It has a closing tag.
The meta element. This is used to provide all sorts of information, including redirects and expiry dates, to web servers and search engines about the document. It has a closing tag. It's also used to provide a description or keywords that may be used by search engines. It takes the form
<meta name="description" content="A description of my web page">
HTML 4.01 transitional Head Example
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html> <head> <title="The title of my document"> <meta name="description" content="A description of my web page"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="my_stylesheet.css" type="text/css"> </head>
The Body Element
The body element can have a number of attributes such as bgcolor (the background colour of the page), text (the text colour, link colour, etc.), however these have been depreciated in HTML 4.01 since this is better achieved using style sheets. In fact it's so much better that you shouldn't even consider using body attributes and for this reason they're not covered here.
It's within the body that all text and elements are enclosed that will show on the page when the browser displays the document.
When writing or adding to an HTML document, it can be difficult to find the bit you want so comments can be useful. A comment takes the form below.
<!--This is an HTML comment-->
If you wish to remove a section of a document without deleted it then you can comment out the section by placing <!-- at the beginning of the section and --> at the end. The browser will ignore everything between these tags.
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