The Title

Each HTML page needs a title to indicate what the page describes. It appears in the title bar of the browser when people view the web page. The title is stored in your browser's favorites (or bookmarks), and also in search engines when they index your pages. Use the <title> tag to give a page a title.

The title indicates what your web page is about and is used to refer to the page in the browser's list of favorites or bookmarks. Titles also appear in the title bar of graphical browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer.

<title> tags are placed within the page header and can be used to describe the contents of the page, as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/transitional.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe</title> </head> <body> ...your page... </body> </html>

You can have only one title in the page, and that title can contain only plain text; that is, no other tags should appear inside the title.

Try to choose a title that's both short and descriptive of the content. Your title should be relevant even out of context. If someone browsing on the Web follows a random link and ends up on this page, or if a person finds your title in a friend's browser history list, would he have any idea what this page is about? You might not intend the page to be used independently of the pages you specifically linked to it, but because anyone can link to any page at any time, be prepared for that consequence and pick a helpful title.

Note

When search engines index your pages, each page title is captured and listed in the search results. The more descriptive your page title, the more likely it is that someone will choose your page from all the search results.

Also, because most browsers put the title in the title bar of the window, you might have a limited number of words available. (Although the text within the <title> tag can be of any length, it might be cut off by the browser when it's displayed.) The following are some other examples of good titles:

<title>Poisonous Plants of North America</title> <title>Image Editing: A Tutorial</title> <title>Upcoming Cemetery Tours, Summer 1999</title> <title>Installing the Software: Opening the CD Case</title> <title>Laura Lemay's Awesome Home Page</title>

Here are some not-so-good titles:

<title>Part Two</title> <title>An Example</title> <title>Nigel Franklin Hobbes</title> <title>Minutes of the Second Meeting of the Fourth Conference of the Committee for the Preservation of English Roses, Day Four, After Lunch</title>

Figure 4.1 shows how a title looks in a browser.

<title>Poisonous Plants of North America</title>

Figure 4.1. A page containing only header elements.