The head Element

The next part of our page is the head section. The first line inside the head is the one that defines the character encoding for the document. This is another element that’s been simplified since XHTML and HTML4, and is an optional feature, but recommended. In the past, you may have written it like this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">  

HTML5 improves on this by reducing the character-encoding meta tag to the bare minimum:

<meta charset="utf-8"> 

In nearly all cases, utf-8 is the value you’ll be using in your documents. A full explanation of character encoding is beyond the scope of this book, and it probably won’t be that interesting to you, either. Nonetheless, if you want to delve a little deeper, you can read up on the topic on W3C or WHATWG.

Encoding Declaration

To ensure that all browsers read the character encoding correctly, the entire character-encoding declaration must be included somewhere within the first 512 characters of your document. It should also appear before any content-based elements (such as the title element that follows it in our example site).
There’s much more we could write about this subject, but we want to keep you awake—so we’ll spare you those details! For now, we’re content to accept this simplified declaration and move on to the next part of our document: 

<title>The HTML5 Herald</title>
<meta name="description" content="The HTML5 Herald">
<meta name="author" content="SitePoint">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/styles.css"> 

  
In these lines, HTML5 barely differs from previous syntaxes. The page title (the only mandatory element inside the head) is declared the same as it always was, and the meta tags we’ve included are merely optional examples to indicate where these would be placed; you could put as many valid meta elements here as you like.
The key part of this chunk of markup is the stylesheet, which is included using the customary link element. There are no required attributes for link other than href and rel. The type attribute (which was common in older versions of HTML) is not necessary, nor was it ever needed to indicate the content type of the stylesheet.