2012-06-29 23:42, Ian Hickson wrote:
I consider all "boilerplate" to be a significant burden. I think there's a
huge win to making it trivial to create a Web page. Anything we require
makes it less trivial.
It's a win, but I'm not sure of the "huge". When learning HTML, it's an
important aspect, and also when typing HTML by hand, but then it's
mostly a convenience - and it helps to avoid annoying problems caused
e.g. by making a single typo in a DOCTYPE declaration. So <!DOCTYPE
html> is really an improvement
Currently you need a DOCTYPE, a character encoding declaration, a title,
and some content. I'd love to be in a position where the empty string
would be a valid document, personally.
Is content really necessary? The validator.nu service accepts the following:
<!DOCTYPE html><title></title>
I don't think we can get rid of DOCTYPE anytime soon, as browser vendors
are stuck with DOCTYPE sniffing.
But the <title> element isn't really needed, and unless I'm mistaken,
the current rules allow its omission under some conditions - which
cannot be tested algorithmically, so conformance checkers should issue a
warning at most about missing <title>.
It might be better to declare <title> optional but strongly recommend
its use on web or intranet pages (it might be rather irrelevant in other
uses of HTML).
Yucca
