Document structure - Intelligence Community Design System

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Introduction

Use semantic HTML Elements for document structure. Three semantic elements are used to give overall document structure:

<html> is the root of an HTML document and contains all elements except the<!DOCTYPE> declaration.
<head> is the container for metadata such as document title, styles and scripts. The<head> element is the first element in the<html> element before the<body> .
<body> defines the body or content of the HTML document. There can only be one<body> in the document.

These elements ensure how a page is displayed is consistent across every browser.

The following example shows the semantic elements for document structure:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Example accurate and meaningful title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Example content heading</h1>
    <p>Example content paragraph</p>
  </body>
</html>

When it goes wrong

Not using the document structure elements accordingly may mean the page is not correctly rendered in every browser.

Omitting the<html> , <head> and <body> is allowed under certain conditions in the HTML spec .

Last reviewed 18 April 2024 .