Jero.net

The title element

The title element is one of the core elements of an HTML document. To quote the HTML 4.01 Specification: Every HTML document must have a title element in the head section. But that's not what this article is about. I'm wondering if the title element could be used for other purposes except for just being there at the title bar of my browser application.

First of all, I'm not wondering what type of content should be inside the title element, but how it could be rendered. Why I'm wondering this is because of the fact that I'm sometimes forced to put almost the exact same content in my h1 element as I have in my title element. Jero.net might not be a good example, but my message board system JeroBB is. Just click on a link and compare the content of both the h1 and the title element with eachother.

As you saw, there's hardly any difference besides the fact that there's always the name of the message board at the end of the title's content. Another example is the HTML 4.01 Specification. The only difference there is that the chapter number is also inside the h1 element.

That confuses me because it doesn't make sense that we should repeat the content of the document title in the first header, but sometimes it seems we don't have a choice. Or maybe we should style the title element?