At a bare minimum, your html file should look like this:
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title></title>
<link href="../Styles/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
<h3>Chapter 1</h3>
<p>It was a dark and stormy night...</p>
</body>
</html>
You can add as many meta tags as you like, but since they'll be ignored it'd be rather pointless. (Metadata only needs to be entered once via
Edit > Meta Editor.)
The <title></title> tags are required, but since they are usually ignored by the ePub reader software, you can leave them empty.
However, you should definitely keep the stylesheet reference. Also don't forget to enclose the chapter header in header tags (h1, h2, h3 ...). Otherwise you won't be able to automatically generate the toc.