Comments on: A Minimal HTML Document

By: patspam

patspam — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:33:12 +0000

Since you’re talking about best practice here, I’d rather see the js script tag at the bottom of the body. That way, if people are following unobtrusive js best practice they’ll get a better YSlow score.

-Patrick (patspam.com)

By: j9t

j9t — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:21:50 +0000

Just one word (link): “The World’s Best HTML Template.”

By: arts-multimedia

arts-multimedia — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:09:14 +0000

I’m sometimes worried about these purists who want everybody to do exactly what the dogma says or else…
In real life, we all use several methods to come to a good result. Being restricted to one method only leads to anaemia.

By: arts-multimedia

arts-multimedia — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:04:22 +0000

No scripting or l. Yet, there are tons of wonderful sites out there and I don’t care if they are written in ugly this or that as long as screen readers can handle them, all is well.

By: bart (Cityvox)

bart (Cityvox) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:27:34 +0000

we had some problems with
when using script from one of our clients.
it is safer to use a chartset over here as well

By: AutisticCuckoo

AutisticCuckoo — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:03:28 +0000

I’ve never liked the term “pretend XHTML”, as it implies we are dressing up HTML as XHTML.

That's exactly what you're doing if you serve it as text/html. No matter how much you wish it to be otherwise, it is HTML if you serve it as such. Invalid, ugly HTML, but still HTML. If you want it to be XHTML and make use of anything XHTML offers beyond what HTML can do, then you must serve it as an application of XML.

By: dyer85

dyer85 — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:16:03 +0000

Look at what Kevin wrote more closely:

...when opened without a web server...

The content will not be rendered as UTF-8 without a web server, unless the browser's default is set as such. When a server isn't available to send the headers, the browser can only check the tag specifying Content-Type. Curtis

By: Philippe

Philippe — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:06:19 +0000

Kevin Yank:
If you had done a minimum of checking, you’d see that Anne’s site sends the content encoding in the http header (text/html;charset=utf-8).

PS – Anne is a ‘he’ not a ’she’.

By: dyer85

dyer85 — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:20:14 +0000

Hi Kevin, nice article. I just had one concern. You specifically state in the section, The Breakdown:

The exact form of the declaration depends on whether your document is HTML 4 (fine for most purposes) or XHTML 1 (enables the page to be processed as XML)...

Although it may be correct XHTML 1.0 to serve as text/html, AFAIK, even browsers capable of serving pages using the XML parser will not do so unless the MIME type is set as application/xhtml+xml. If this is indeed the case, setting the DOCTYPE to use XHTML isn't sufficient to make the browser use XML parsing. You might consider making a separate section for XHTML 1.1, which should always be served with application/xhtml+xml, IIRC.

By: Kevin Yank

Kevin Yank — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:55:52 +0000

Would it be trollish to point out Anne’s Weblog? View source if you don’t know what I mean.

Anne’s code leaves out the , , and tags, which is perfectly legal to do in an HTML 4 document, much as it was for HTML 3.2 (as mentioned at the top of my article). This "ultra-minimalism" does sacrifice a couple of benefits that I would not be comfortable with on most sites, however. The most important element she has left out is the lang attribute on the tag, which identifies the primary language in use in the page. Search engines and other spidering systems make good use of this information. The fact that she has no content-type tag will cause the files that make up her site to be interpreted as Latin-1 encoded text, instead of UTF-8, when opened without a web server. But if that is not an issue for her, then she can do without it.