DEV 5.1 Include this information at the top

These are fairly basic code elements that can be cut and pasted into a standard template. They are important for accessibility and code validation. They provide:

The version of HTML used;
The language in which the page is written;
Useful information for search engines, browsing devices and people;
Useful navigation options.

Specify a valid Document Type Definition (DTD):
- Ideally you should use the most up-to-date web technology
- See the List of valid DTD's from W3C.
Identify the primary natural language:
- Add lang attribute to opening <HTML> declaration;
- Choose from list of ISO language codes.
Provide unique and meaningful titles for each page:
- Vital for accessibility - good for bookmarking:
  - The title should correlate with the main page title (the H1,)
  - Avoid long titles where the relevant part for the page only appears at the end,
  - The most unique thing should go first - a 'reverse bookmark' works well.
Provide metadata:
- At the least, a description and keywords and the default character set used;
- You may also want to explore using elements from standard metadata sets to create a local metadata standard for all your sites:
  - Public sector sites should investigate the Irish Public Service Metadata; Standard; (IPSMS)
- Consider providing navigation information in metadata:
  - See more on navigational metadata;
- Provide links to external style sheets and alternative styles for different media types:
  - Print particularly useful for excluding all navigational elements etc. from print out.

Example Document type definitions:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Language declarations:

html documents:

<html lang="en">

For xhtml documents:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">

Page title (a 'reverse breadcrumb'):

<title>5.1 Include this stuff at the top - HTML coding - NDA Accessibility Guidance </title>

Basic metadata:

<meta name="description" content="Describe page and the scope of contents provided">

<meta name="keywords" content="Relevent keywords, Relevent Phrases, comma, Separated">

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Some navigational metadata examples:

<link rel="start" href="tips_intro.html">

<link rel="home" href="../index.html" />

<link rel="contents" href="../about/index.html" title="Contents: accessibility guidelines" />

<link rel="help" href=" ../about/help.html" />

<link rel="author" href="mailto:

xyz@aaa.com" />

<link rel="prev" href="page9.htm">

<link rel="contents" href="contents.html" title="accessibility tips contents">

<link rel="next" href="page11">

Linked style sheets:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="standard.css")

<style type="text/css" media="screen">@import url(hidefromoldbrowsers.css);</style>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="Braille" href="braileversion.css")

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="printversion.css" />