<head>: The Document Metadata (Header) element

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The <head> HTML element contains machine-readable information (metadata) about the document, like its title, scripts, and style sheets. There can be only one <head> element in an HTML document.

Note: <head> primarily holds information for machine processing, not human-readability. For human-visible information, like top-level headings and listed authors, see the <header> element.

Attributes

This element includes the global attributes.

profile

The URIs of one or more metadata profiles, separated by white space.

Examples

html
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en-US">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
    <title>Document title</title>
  </head>
</html>

Technical summary

Content categories None.
Permitted content

If the document is an <iframe> srcdoc document, or if title information is available from a higher level protocol (like the subject line in HTML email), zero or more elements of metadata content.

Otherwise, one or more elements of metadata content where exactly one is a <title> element.

Tag omission The start tag may be omitted if the first thing inside the <head> element is an element.
The end tag may be omitted if the first thing following the <head> element is not a space character or a comment.
Permitted parents An <html> element, as its first child.
Implicit ARIA role No corresponding role
Permitted ARIA roles No role permitted
DOM interface HTMLHeadElement

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard
# the-head-element

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also