HTML Checking for Large Sites
Rocket Validator automatically scans your sites for accessibility issues using the W3C Validator,
hosted on our own servers and integrated into our web crawler.
Stray start tag “head”.
A <head> start tag has been found in an unexpected place in the document structure. Check that the <head> section appears before the <body> section, and that is not duplicated.
The <head> section of an HTML document is the container of metadata about the document, and must appear before the <body> section. A common cause of this issue is duplicated <head> sections.
Here is an example of a minimal HTML document structure:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<p></p>
</body>
</html>Related W3C validator issues
The <head> section of an HTML document contains metadata about the document, and as a minimum it must include a <title> tag defining the document title.
Common causes for this issue are forgetting to define the <title>, or duplicated <head> sections where one of them does not include the title.
Here’s an example of a minimal HTML document including the title:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Don't panic! This is the title</title>
</head>
<body>
<p></p>
</body>
</html>
<meta> tags, used for defining metadata about HTML documents, must appear within the <head>...</head> section, but it has been found out of place. Check the document structure to ensure there are no <meta> tags outside the head section.
A common cause of this issue is having a duplicated, out of place <head>...</head> section. Ensure that this section appears in its proper place and is the only container for <meta> tags.
All HTML documents must start with a <!DOCTYPE> (Document Type Declaration), that informs browsers about the type and version of HTML used to build the document. In HTML5, this is simply <!DOCTYPE html> and must appear at the start of the document.
Here is an example of a minimal HTML document, including the Document Type Declaration at its start:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<p></p>
</body>
</html>
A stray start tag <html> has been found in the document. As this tag defines the start of the whole HTML document, it should appear only once.