Lesson 1.5. Global structure of HTML pages

Global HTML page architecture

An HTML page contains a lot of hidden information. We finds content that is not displayed directly in the browser, but which are nevertheless of primary importance. This information is structured inside the page and separated by tags according to the following architecture:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>Page title</title>
        <meta name="description" content="Short description of the page" />
    </head>
    <body>
        ...
        <!-- Displayed page content -->
        ...
    </body>
</html>

<doctype>

The tag <! Doctype html> is the typ e of doc ument. Here, of course, this is a HTML document. This tag allows compatibility between HTML and XML which is another more general markup file format.

<html>

The <html> tag marks the beginning of the HTML code. It is generally composed of two sections:

`<head>` is the header of the page, it contains metadata (title, description, scripts ...);
`<body>` is the body of the page, this section contains the content of the page that will be displayed in the browser.

It is recommended to add the attribute `lang =" xx "` in the tag `<html>` to specify the language of the page.

<head>

The header of the page contains metadata, this information is not displayed in the browser, but is necessary for the browser to correctly interpret the content. This section can also contain information that search engines will analyze for page indexing. For search engine optimization, it is a good practice to include at least the following two tags:

<title> contains the title of the page that will appear in the browser tab
<meta name =" description "content =" ... "> contains the page description that will be displayed in search engine results.

This information may seem unecessary, since it does not appear directly on the page. They are however very important since they are used, among other things, for referencing pages in search engines.

Lesson 1.4 Summary Lesson 1.6

Lesson 1.5. Global structure of HTML pages

Global HTML page architecture

<doctype>

<html>

<head>

See also