The concept, on a single page
The pact of the <head>
Why nothing that lives there appears on the page, why everything that lives there governs the page — and why that calls for an observatory.
HTML splits the document into two territories. The <body> is the ground: everything it carries becomes pixel, text, button — the things the herbarium pressed, leaf by leaf. The <head> is the sky above that ground: metadata the browser reads before drawing the first pixel, and which never appears on the page.
That is the pact of the <head>: nothing there appears, everything there governs. The connection opened ahead of time lives in a line of connections; the official address and the document's other languages, in the lines of identity; the right color before the CSS lands, in those of appearance; zoom, referrer trails and robots, in those of behavior; the next page, already downloaded, in those of speculation.
Why an observatory
Because that sky is like the real one: always up there, and nobody looks. No visitor sees a preconnect; they see the page open fast. Nobody sees the canonical; they see the right result in the search. Each element of the <head> is a star that only appears through an instrument — view source, the network tab, the validator. This catalogue is the telescope, aimed — one star per page.
Why lots of little pages
For the same reason as the herbarium and the reliquary: every star, every drawer, every ordering and this very text are separate HTML files, linked together, written by a generator a few hundred lines long. State becomes an address; the browser handles the rest.