1. I don’t want to confuse things, but the first line in the example isn’t an element at all; it is a document type declaration (also called DOCTYPE declaration) that identifies this document as an HTML5 document. What’s Up, HTML5?, but for this discussion, suffice it to say that including it lets modern browsers know they should interpret the document as written according to the HTML5 specification.

2. The entire document is contained within an html element. The html element is called the root element because it contains all the elements in the document, and it may not be contained within any other element. It is used for both HTML and XHTML documents.

3. Within the html element, the document is divided into a head and a body. The head element contains descriptive information about the document itself, such as its title, the style sheet(s) it uses, scripts, and other types of “meta” information.

4. The meta elements within the head element provide information about the document itself. A meta element can be used to provide all sorts of information, but in this case, it specifies the character encoding (the standardized collection of letters, numbers, and symbols) used in the document. I don’t want to go into too much detail on this right now, but know that there are many good reasons for specifying the charset in every document, so I have included it as part of the minimal document structure.

5. Also in the head is the mandatory title element. According to the HTML specification, every document must contain a descriptive title.

6. Finally, the body element contains everything that we want to show up in the browser window.

HTML5 2016-06-13View: 1645

Categories: HTML5

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