<title> Tag Syntax

<head>
   ... metadata content ...
   <title>... text content ...</title>
   ...
</head>
Rules for coding the HTML title element

Make sure you understand the difference between a tag and element and are familiar with the definitions of namespace and other HTML terms.

  1. Inside a head element where metadata content is allowed, code a single required title element.
  2. Begin the title element with a starting <title> tag. The element name uses lower case letters and should be in the HTML namespace, which it will pick up automatically from the xmlns attribute on the <html> tag.
  3. Code the text for the document title between the start tag and the end tag.
  4. End the title element with a matching </title> closing tag.

<title> Content Model

Contents of the <title> Tag

The title element should only contain text. It is not allowed to have any child elements. Style tags such as for italic (<i>) or bold text (<b>) would not work anyway since the appearance of the window title is determined by the operating system. Since it cannot contain any tag markup, any < symbols must be escaped as &lt; and, as in any HTML code, ampersands should be escaped as &amp;.

HTML comments should not be coded inside a title element. (See the issues with HTML 5 comments.)