Usage of the Title Element
I originally wrote this about 4 years ago but did not finish it, I think, and thought I would publish it as it is. The idea is basically finished’ish but still needs some work.
… Authors should use the TITLE element
to identify the contents of a document. Since users often consult documents out of context, authors should provide context-rich titles. Thus, instead of a title such as “Introduction”, which doesn’t provide much contextual background, authors should supply a title such as “Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping” instead.For reasons of accessibility, user agents must always make the content of
the TITLE element available to users. …
This is a quote from 7.4.2 The TITLE element of the 4.01 HTML specification. This states that the title element should be used to provide context for an individual page (within a collection of webpages) so that we have an idea where this information fits into the scheme of the website or topic. Since it must always be available to the user we can count on this to set
the context for our page’s content.
Best Practices
So what does context-rich mean. Giving a short concise title for the user to be able to put the page’s content into context. Some would take the content that is found in the h1 element and in many cases that is a good idea. A case where this might not be a good idea is when the h1 tag is not concisely descriptive of the content and is more creative. An example (Stuart: August 29) is where the title of the page is “American Dream” when the page is a profile on “Paul Auster”. The title element should be something like Profile of Paul Auster and then the h1 element can be the more creative American Dream.
Order and Separators
A key thing to remember is that the title element will be displayed in the title bar and very often in the search engine results page. To be ultimately useful in this capactity the left most portion of the title content should be describe the content and then the other information can follow such as site name or title and section information (if included). It seems that the -, ., | seem to be the preferred separators for title content.
Read More
W3C Links
- The TITLE element: HTML 4.0 Specification: The Global Structure of an HTML
Document - The Title Element: The Style Guide
- The Title Element: XHTML 2.0 Specification
- <title>: the most important element of a quality Web page: Quality Web Tips
Other Pertinent Links
- The Sound of the Accessible Title Tag Separator – Standards-schmandards
- Page titles on news article pages | Holovaty.com
- Document titles and title separators | 456 Berea Street
- Page Title Labeling | evolt.org
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