Encyclopedia / HTML

<head>

The invisible part of the page that machines read first.

It holds the charset, viewport, title, description, canonical link, social-card tags, structured data, and links to CSS and fonts. Visitors never see it directly, but it decides how the page looks in search results, link previews and AI answers.

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  <title>Ada Park · Product designer</title>
  <meta name="description" content="…">
  <link rel="canonical" href="https://ada.example/">
</head>

Related terms

Title tag Meta description Open Graph & social cards Structured data (JSON-LD)

Where it shows up in a page load

  1. Step 8: Parse HTML → DOM. The browser reads the HTML from top to bottom and builds the DOM, a tree of every element. Along the way it finds the CSS, JavaScript, fonts and images and requests them. Many of those requests run in parallel.

Watch the full request journey →

More in HTML

The document itself: what each piece of content is.

HTML document Semantic HTML DOM

Open in the interactive encyclopedia →