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0 pointsjhgb4y ago0 comments

Don't you only need

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>

these days? That's slightly worse but not terribly so IMO.

0 comments

dheera4y ago

Oh I actually quoted the website's source. They have that DTD meta crap in there.

But I think you can just do <html> nowadays and it empirically just works. Seriously, screw the anti-DRY people that want me to put some !DOCTYPE or xmlns tags with some W3C links or some DTD nonsense inside ... I should only have to specify "html" exactly once, no more.

If I had designed the spec I would have just made it

    <html version="4.0">
    <html version="5.0">
    <html version="5.1">

Incredibly more readable, and memorizable. A markup language (literally), by virtue of being a markup language, should not be impossible to memorize. Making scary strings like "-//W3C///DTD" part of the spec is counterproductive.

skymt4y ago

You don't even need <html>. <https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-ht...>

This is a valid HTML5 document:

    <!doctype html>
    <title>This is valid!</title>
    <p>Really, it's valid!

Paste it into the validator yourself if you don't believe me: <https://validator.w3.org/nu/#textarea>

tannhaeuser4y ago

That's SGML tag inference at work (theoretically at least, since browsers have HTML parsing rules hardcoded). SGML knows, by the DOCTYPE declaration, that the document must start with an "html" element, so it infers it if it isn't there. Next, by the content model declared for the "html" element (normally obtained via the ugly public identifier that sibling comments complain about), a "head" element is expected, so SGML infers it as well if it's declared omissible, and so on.

masswerk4y ago

In the "old days", web pages were often just the bare content (no html, head, body containers, no DOCTYPE declaration). A few sites also featured just the body tag (and respective content) for setting the background attribute for the page background color.

E.g., this is the entire code of Netscape's first home page:

    <TITLE>Welcome to Mosaic Communications Corporation!</TITLE>
    <CENTER>
    <A HREF="MCOM/index2.html"><IMG SRC="MCOM/images/mcomwelcome1.gif" BORDER=1></A>
    <H3>
    <A HREF="MCOM/index2.html">Click on the Image or here to advance</A>
    </H3>
    </CENTER>

http://home.mcom.com/

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jhgbOP4y ago

Wow, I didn't actually know that. That feels...so dirty!

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