CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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Rosdi Kasim
Rosdi Kasim

Reputation: 25956

In HTML5, should I skip the <html> tag?

I know in HTML5 it is not neccessary to write <html> tag. This is discussed in this question, regarding if it is it necessary to write head body and html tags.

But should I skip it? Is it recommended to skip? The reason I ask this is I am seeing lots of HTML5 tutorials/templates on the internet that does this in their code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<!--[if IE 9 ]><html class="ie9"><![endif]-->
<head>
.....

Looks superfluous and completely unnecessary to me, or is it?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 270

Answers (2)

user764357
user764357

Reputation:

The question linked in the comments answers the question if you can, and that is you can omit in the opening <html> tag. However...

You shouldn't.

As the answers in this question and the question linked above show, the rules around when you can or cannot omit certain tags are long and lawyer-esque.

Written code isn't just for machines its for people too. This isn't to suggest that HTML should be human-readable without a browser, that's farcical, but it should be programmer-readable and there is a difference.

This is perfectly valid HTML:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<title>Hello</title>
<p>Welcome to this example.</p>

However, without consulting the spec I am not immediately sure where each element will be in the computed DOM, for the curious its equivalent to:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html><head><title>Hello</title>
</head><body><p>Welcome to this example.</p></body></html>

However, if time is at a premium (and programmer time is almost always more expensive than computing time nowadays) then knowing quite clearly what a document is doing is vital.

No doubt someone will ask, what about when space or transmission speed is at a premium. In those cases thorough profiling to determine the exact bottleneck is important, and on the fly compression, good caching of HTML, or even automated removal of elements using a library will all be vastly superior options to removing tags in source code that is to be written and interpreted by people.

Upvotes: 3

grill
grill

Reputation: 1170

<html> is required for a valid HTML document only if the tag is preceded by a comment.

An html element's start tag may be omitted if the first thing inside the html element is not a comment.

See the W3C specification for details.

Upvotes: 0

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