In most cases, the HTML, HEAD and BODY tags can be safely omitted. Note that the formal syntax of HTML 3.0 is defined by the document type definition, which is included as an appendix of this specification. The details of the HEAD and BODY elements will be described in subsequent sections.
The permitted syntax of HTML 3.0 compliant documents is specified by the DTD. This includes the content model for each element, defining what markup is permitted within each element. The DTD uses SGML entities in content models to express regular features of HTML 3.0, for example %body.content defines what markup is permitted within the BODY element. A number of other elements also share this content model, e.g. BQ, DIV, FORM, TH and TD.
The description of each tag includes the content model and the permitted context (which elements can contain this tag). Where practical, these properties are given with the same entity names as used in the DTD, and should help the newcomer to get to grips with understanding the DTD itself. For example, the description of the NOTE element starts with: