Dustin Diaz recently posted about skinny doctypes, which basically boiled down to:
[sourcecode lang=”html”]
[/sourcecode]
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:
[sourcecode lang=”html”]
[/sourcecode]
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.
4 replies on “Minimum HTML 5 Document”
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>Nice catch, that does pass as valid HTML5. That might be a little too minimal though 🙂
Geoffrey, that’s a fun test and all 🙂 But basically the point was that we can actively and confidently use [!doctype html]
Actually, it doesn’t. Geoffrey forgot the
!in<!doctype html>:p