Structure of HTML Document

Web Page Construction
Structure of HTML Document

All well-formed HTML documents:

are contained in an HTML tag
have a HEAD tag
have a TITLE tag in the HEAD tag
have a BODY tag containing all other tags comprising the page

<html>

<head>
<title>This Title Appears in the Web Browser's Title Bar</title>
</head>

<body>

This is where most of the tags go that govern what you see, and interact with in the browser view.

</body>

</html>

The tags that structure your HTML document are nested.

Everything is nested within the <html> and the </html>.
HEAD tags (i.e. TITLE) are nested inside the <HEAD> tag
BODY tags are nested inside the <BODY> tag

Be sure to check the entry on nesting in the glossary if you not familiar with this concept. Or check out Dan's Web Tips: Nesting (added May 2005)

The <body> tags make up the visual components of the HTML page as seen through a web browser.

The <head> tags contain information about that page. The most important is the TITLE tag. The text that is written between the start and end tags of the TITLE tag appears in the title bar of the web browser displaying the page. TITLE content is also used as the clickable component of a "favorites" or "bookmark" entry and is used by search engines, in many contexts, to represent your page.

NOTE: It is tempting to ignore proper structure, because many web browsers will let you "get away" with leaving out the HTML, HEAD and BODY tags. But malformed page will be vulnerable to context challenges and can be rejected as sub-standard in the eyes of post-production processing, such as that done by web search engines. If you care about your page, make it right.