Here's an example of what I gather to be best practice.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd";>
<html lang="en-gb" xml:lang="en-gb" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=utf-8" />
<title>h1 text - site section - site name</title>
<script
type="text/javascript">/*<![CDATA[*/document.documentElement.className="hasJS"/*]]>*/</script>
<meta name="Description" content="Description text which Google
shows under search result." />
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" />
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
@import "blah.css";
...
</style>
<link href="blah-blah.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
media="print" />
<script src="more-scripts.js " type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
The important things as I understand:
1. Doctype appears as the very first thing, not even a space before it,
otherwise IEv6 may go into quirks mode.
2. lang stated in html element
3. first head item should be char encoding so document can be interpreted as
quickly as possible.
4. Page title with H1 text first and if necessary other info in reverse
breadcrumb order for accessibility and SEO.
5. hasJS script - so JS affected styling can be interpreted immediately.
6. General meta tags. The only two of worth are:
a. Imagetoolbar - which prevents IE displaying that awful icon
set over images.
b. Description - The text that Google shows beneath a search
result.
7. Stylesheets - (see:
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/04/09/dont-use-import/)
a. Use links to external style sheets which must not contain
@import.
b. If you must use @import use them in the HTML style tag not
in external files.
8. The head section must not finish with a self closing element such as link.
It may cause copy selection errors and "Flash of un-styled content" issues
I'm very interested to hear other members perspectives.
mike foskett
http://websemantics.co.uk/
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