3. HEAD

The HEAD contains general information, or meta-information, about the document. The contents of the HEAD are not displayed as part of the document text: the displayed material is found within the BODY. Consequently, only certain mark-up elements can be placed within the HEAD. These are:

BASE -- A record of the original URL of the document: this allows you to move the document to a new directory (or even a new site) and have relative URLs access the appropriate place with respect to the original URL.
ISINDEX -- Usually placed in the HEAD by the server or a server script/program to indicate that a document is searchable.
LINK -- Defines the relationship(s) between this document and another or others. A document can have several LINK elements.
META -- A container for document metainformation.
NEXTID -- A parameter used by automated HTML editors to create unique identifiers for the documents.
TITLE -- The title of the document. This element is mandatory -- all documents must have a TITLE.

3.0.1 Netscape/HTML 3 Extensions

The following HEAD elements are not part of the "official" HTML, but are supported to some degree by some browsers.

SCRIPT -- Introduced by Netscape Inc. for including script programs within an HTML document. This is only functional on certain versions of Netscape Navigator 2.0.
STYLE -- an HTML 3 element for including stylesheet information. This is only supported by the Arena browser.

3.0.2 Example of a HEAD

<HTML>
  <HEAD>
    <TITLE> Goofy Stuff from Blobby Page </TITLE>
    <BASE HREF="http://www.somewhere.org/stuff/blob.html">
    <LINK HREF="http://www.somewhere.org/stuff/index.html" REL="index">
  </HEAD>
  <BODY>
    ..... text of the document
  </BODY>
</HTML>

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Page Last Updated: 4 December 1995