<link>
Connects the document to external resources: canonical URLs, stylesheets, icons, feeds, hreflang alternates, and resource hints.
Baseline: Widely available · Document structure
When to use it
For rel=canonical on every page, rel=alternate hreflang for translations, rel=icon, and preconnect/preload performance hints.
When not to
Don't preload what you don't use — unused hints waste bandwidth and get flagged by devtools.
Key attributes
rel- relationship (canonical, stylesheet, icon, alternate, preconnect…)
href- target URL
hreflang- language of the target
Example
<link rel='canonical' href='https://html-tags.com/tags/link.html'>