HTML: Semantics of `title` Element Content

Published on Feb 26, 2007 (updated Jun 12, 2021), filed under development, html, semantics. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon.)

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I already proposed this in October 2005 but see the need to bring it up again: It would be useful to allow other elements within the title of an HTML document. Why? You otherwise cannot mark abbreviations and other flow content elements, which means their meaning gets lost. For example, you cannot write

<title><abbr>HTML</abbr> document title</title>

(whose markup wouldn’t need to be rendered), but are required to use

<title>HTML document title</title>

Therefore, there’s no way to tell that “HTML” is an abbreviation here.

The set of elements we could allow within title’s limited. HTML probably benefits from enabling

abbr,
del,
ins, and eventually
em and
strong.

I’ll suggest this again to the respective working groups, despite the original responses. And I’m looking forward to your thoughts.

Update (February 27, 2007)

Lachlan Hunt writes (via a W3C mailing list):

For compatibility reasons in HTML, title cannot contain elements because of the way it is parsed. It would be possible to do so in XHTML, but then that would be another incompatibility between the 2 languages and there is also limited usefulness in doing so anyway, since many of the use cases for title are plain text. e.g. the window’s title bar, bookmarks, search results, etc.

While enabling other elements within title means a compatibility issue, I currently do not believe that you cannot ignore them under certain circumstances, like in the title bar. [What am I missing?]

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I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and manager at various companies (e.g., Google); I’m an active web and tool developer (code optimization, digital defense), a contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and a book author (O’Reilly, dxsrc). You’ll like my work if you value pragmatic, proactive problem-solvers. Let’s connect.