title: What are best practices to order elements in <head>?
body: <p>can use anything in any order? does placing of <code>&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"&gt;</code> is important before <code>&lt;title&gt;</code></p>
  
  <p>this is most used, is it best way?</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
          "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"&gt;
  
  &lt;html lang="en"&gt;
  
  &lt;head&gt;
      &lt;meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"&gt;
      &lt;title&gt;Title Goes Here&lt;/title&gt;
      &lt;link rel="stylesheet" href="http://sstatic.net/so/all.css?v=5912"&gt;
      &lt;link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://sstatic.net/so/favicon.ico"&gt;
       &lt;script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
  &lt;script type="text/javascript"&gt;
      $(function() {
  
          $("#wmd-input").focus();
          $("#title").focus();
          $("#revisions-list").change(function() { window.location = '/posts/1987065/edit/' + $(this).val(); });
  
      });        
  &lt;/script&gt;
  
  
  &lt;/head&gt;
  
  &lt;body&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;This is my web page&lt;/p&gt;
  
      &lt;script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/mootools.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
  &lt;/body&gt;
  
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>this site <a href="http://stackoverflow.com">http://stackoverflow.com</a> doesn't have any encoding and <code>&lt;meta&gt;</code></p>
  
  <p>I use a CMS which has SEO component which adds every <code>&lt;meta&gt;</code> for SEO after all js and css. files. can placing of any elements in any order which are allowed in <code>&lt;head&gt;</code> affect document compatibility and encoding?</p>