the <head> tag

Several things can be placed betwen the opening and closing head tags:

the <title> tag is the only 'compulsory' tag.

Place inside the title tag the text that describes the contents of the page. This is the text that will appear on the browser's title bar, in the favourites or bookmarks and in the history list
<meta> tags.

These tags are used to categorise information about the webpage. They are not essential, but they can become important as search engines become more sophisticated. For the moment we will not be concerned with them.
<link> tags.

These are used to link to external files, particularly style sheets. More will be said about style sheets later.
<script> and <style> tags.

These are used to insert javascript and to embed styles into a web page. More about these later.

An example

The head section of the web page that makes this lesson could be written as:


<head>
  <title>The head tag</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="htmlstyle.css">
</head>