Photo shows how the beginning of an HTML document should look. Entire header is placed before the beginning body tag. Your title, content sections and css filename should be replaced with your information.
This cheat sheet includes current standards of HTML coding syntax as of December 2025. To use the provided header tags, simply copy and paste. Remove the spaces after the < and before the > in the tag. Data contained in tags in the color red should be replaced with your information. Make sure your css file name matches the name in your document.
| Tag Name | Purpose | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Document Type Declaration | Declares the document type and version of HTML. | < !DOCTYPE html > |
| HTML Language | Declares language of document. | < html lang="en" > |
| Title Declaration | Defines the title of the document, shown in the browser's title bar or tab. | < title >Your Document Title< /title > |
| Meta Charset | Declares the character encoding for the HTML document. | < meta charset="UTF-8" > |
| Meta Description | Provides the name and description of the document for search engines. | < meta name="description" content="Your Documents Content Description" > |
| Meta Keywords | Provides the keywords of the document for search engines. | < meta name="keywords" content="Your Documents Keywords" > |
| Meta Author | Provides the author of the document for search engines. | < meta name="author" content="Author Name IE name, company, etc" > |
| Meta Viewport | Declares the document size and scale for responsive design. | < meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" > |
| Link Stylesheet | Links html document to css stylesheet. | < link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" > |