The HEAD contains general information about the document. None of the elements authorized to exist in the contents of the HEAD are displayed; the displayed material is found within the BODY.

1.1 TITLE

<TITLE>...</TITLE>

    The TITLE is not part of the document text. Often the title is used by a browser to label the display window. Some Web search engines only search the title of Web pages. Therefore the text of the TITLE should be kept short but sufficient to identify the document.

1.2 BASE

<BASE HREF="..." TARGET="...">

The BASE element provides the absolute URL base to be used for any relative URL links in this document. It must be a complete file name, and is usually the original URL of this document. If this file is moved, having the BASE set to the original URL eliminates the need to also move all the documents which are identified by relative URL links in this document.

Netscape 2.0 defines the TARGET attribute to define a default named target window for every link in a document that does not have an explicit TARGET attribute.

1.3 META

<META HTTP-EQUIV="..." NAME="..." CONTENT="..." URL="...">

The META element is used within the HEAD element to embed document meta-information not defined by other HTML elements. Such information may be extracted by servers/browsers. The HTTP-EQUIV attribute binds the element to an HTTP response header. If not present, the NAME attribute should be used to identify this meta-information and it should not be used within an HTTP response header. If the NAME attribute is not present, the name can be assumed equal to the value of HTTP-EQUIV. The CONTENT attribute defines the meta-information content to be associated with the given name and/or HTTP response header.

The URL attribute is a Netscape extension. Netscape 1.1 has added a automatic refresh capability using the META element by setting the HTTP-EQUIV attribute to "REFRESH", the CONTENT attribute to a number of seconds, and the URL attribute to the file to load which defaults to reloading the same file. Netscape 1.1 also recognizes placing the URL inside the quotes which define the CONTENT value by using a semicolon following the number of seconds, then the URL=http://... text. For example,

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT=30 URL="http://www.pcnet.com/~rhswain">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="30;URL=http://www.pcnet.com/~rhswain">

Some Web search engines look for the following META elements:

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="...">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="...">