A normal HTML page will consist, in outline, of the following sequence of tags
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C// DTD HTML 3.2 Draft//EN"> <html> <head> <title> .......... </title> </head> <body> .......... .......... </body> </html>
Many of these tags are actually optional.
This is actually a comment that indicates to browsers that the page is in HTML 3.2, pages using earlier versions of HTML may start differently, however there is upwards compatability between versions of HTML and this may be safely omitted for hand written code. HTML generators usually include this comment along with indication of the particular generator used.
The <html> container tag indicates to the browser that the document is in HTML and should be displayed in accordance with the HTML specification. The server which has sent the page to the browser may also infer this from the file name and indicate this fact to the browser as part of the HTTP dialogue between the server and browser. If, for some reason, your file does not have a name that is recognised by the server, you should include this tag.
The optional <head> container tag may include the following tags <title>, <isindex>, <base>, <meta>, and <link>. These tags are all used to provide information to the browser that does not appear in the display.
HTML 3.2 indicates that the <title> tag is mandatory. If you omit the <title> container tag most browsers will still display the page as you expected but untitled will appear in the browser window title bar and history list and may appear in a user's bookmark or favourites list.
You will need to include this optional tag if you want to take advantage of any of the attributes of the tag. The <body> container tag includes all the text and mark-up that will actually be displayed.