Is it good practice to add a php include of the head section in my pages?

Suzi Larsen picture Suzi Larsen · Oct 16, 2012 · Viewed 11.9k times · Source

I am creating my portfolio site and I am wanting to include the head section as a php include on my page. Reason being is because the site will have a fair few pages and I will want to make changes later on to things later on like tidying up the css files.

For example;

<head>
    <?php include('head.php'); ?>
</head>

as opposed to all this below being shown on each and every page:

    <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
    <title></title>
    <meta name="description" content="">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/normalize.css">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/main.css">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/1140.css">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/ie.css">
    <script src="js/vendor/modernizr-2.6.1.min.js"></script>
</head>

I just didn't know if this was good practice to do, as with this being my portfolio site, I need the code to be correct from the start also as they will probably look into the standard of it also.

What are your opinions and advice people? Thanks.

Answer

Shoe picture Shoe · Oct 16, 2012

Yep, it's quite standard. But instead of writing:

<head>
    <?php include('head.php'); ?>
</head>

you should put the tags inside head.php. I say it's better because what's inside head.php has no sense without the head tags, so they are kinda linked together. It's good practice to join things so linked into a single file without having to repeat open and close head tags for each page.

Actually, it's even good practice (and commonly used) to have header.php, body.php and footer.php files that has respectively:

header.php

<html>
<head>
...
</head>
<body>

body.php

...

footer.php

</body>
</html>