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HTML Guide

Stray start tag “link”.

A stray start tag “link” error occurs when a <link> element appears outside the <head> section, for example after the document’s closing </html> tag.

The <link> element is used to reference external resources like stylesheets and must appear inside the document’s <head> section, before </head>.

Valid usage example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>Link Tag Example</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/app.css">
  </head>
  <body>
  </body>
</html>

In this example, the <link> tag is correctly placed within the <head> element.

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Related W3C validator issues