Minimum HTML 5 Document
Dustin Diaz recently posted about skinny doctypes, which basically boiled down to:
<!doctype html>
Folks in the comments pointed out that this is the doctype that HTML 5 uses. I’d only been glancing at HTML 5 from time to time, but this got me to look at it a little bit closer. I went to the W3C Validator to see what the minimum HTML 5 document looked like. Here’s the smallest document that still validated:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Now this is what I’m talking about, simple and to the point.
The validator does give one warning for this document, but it’s simply to mention that HTML 5 conformance is still experimental.
That’s untrue: the html, head, and body elements all have optional start and end tags. The shortest valid document is:
<doctype html><title></title>Geoffrey Sneddon
2 Dec 08 at 11:46 am
Nice catch, that does pass as valid HTML5. That might be a little too minimal though :-)
Joseph Scott
2 Dec 08 at 12:43 pm
Geoffrey, that’s a fun test and all :) But basically the point was that we can actively and confidently use [!doctype html]
Dustin Diaz
2 Dec 08 at 1:35 pm