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7.4 The Document Head

7.4.1 The HEAD Element

The HEAD Element specifies that both start and end tags are optional; neither start or end tag for this element is present in the document, but the sub-elements below should still work.

7.4.2 The TITLE Element

The title is the only element that is required by the specification, and it should always be made accessible in some way by the User Agent, but the mechanism may vary between User Agents.

7.4.3 The TITLE Attribute

This does not really belong as a subsection of 7.4 (HEAD element), but this paragraph has a title, and the User Agent should provide access to it in some way.

7.4.4 Meta data (Optional)

One of the META tags in the header section specifies the author of this document. If your browser provides a way to access this, that is excellent. However, the specification explicitly states that "User Agents are not required to support meta data mechanisms".

7.5 The Document Body

7.5.1 The BODY Element

This document should have a blue background and small circles filled in a darker blue. There are also large blue circles, but they should blend in with the background, since they are the same color, and surrounded by transparent pixels in the image file. If you are forcing your own styles on the document, please deactivate that at least temporarily so you can tell whether the browser is handling document-specified styles correctly.
Normal Text should be yellow, so the following word should blend in with its background: word
Unvisited Links should be green, so the following link should blend in with its background unless activated or visited (links to "nowhere"): link
Visited Links should be red, so the following link should blend in with its background (links to this page): link
Active Links should be a brown or tan color, so the following link should blend in with its background when active (links to this page): link

7.5.2 Element Identifiers: The id and class Attributes

This is most easily testable using stylesheets. If stylesheets are not supported, ignore this test.

This sentence should be green due to the class attribute, and bold due to the id attribute.

This is the next paragraph; neither attribute should be propagated to this sentence.

7.5.4 Grouping Elements: The DIV and SPAN Elements

If your browser supports stylesheets and recognizes these as valid elements, they will have different borders (3 pixels outset black for the DIV, 1 pixel solid black for the SPAN).
This is the contents of the DIV, with a SPAN within.

7.5.5 Headings: The H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 Elements

Headers have been used extensively throughout these tests, but here are some explicit to verify that more important headings are rendered in a larger font that less important headings. H1 is considered the most important heading, and H6 the least important heading (If CSS is supported, you can check that the headers are handled differently, since they are defined to have progressively thinner borders for less important headings).

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5
Heading 6

7.5.6 The ADDRESS Element

If CSS is supported, there should be a purple groove border around the ADDRESS element below.

Contact person for this page:
Brian McCloud, mauvecloud at mauvecloud dot net

Valid HTML 4.01!