Don't forget these tags to make HTML work like you expect
47 comments
·October 27, 2025dugmartin
I know this was a joke:
<div id="root"></div>
<script src="bundle.js"></script>
<main>...</main>
ilaksh
Anyone else prefer to use web components without bundling?
I probably should not admit this, but I have been using Lit Elements with raw JavaScript code. Because I stopped using autocomplete awhile ago.
I guess not using TypeScript at this point is basically the equivalent for many people these days of saying that I use punch cards.
VPenkov
37 Signals [0] famously uses their own Stimulus [1] framework on most of their products. Their CEO is a proponent of the whole no-build approach because of the additional complexity it adds, and because it makes it difficult for people to pop your code and learn from it.
[0]: https://basecamp.com/ [1]: https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/
christophilus
Dunno. You can build without minifying if you want it to be (mostly) readable. I wouldn’t want to give up static typing again in my career.
nonethewiser
Can't say I generally agree with dropping TS for JS but I suppose it's easier to argue when you are working on smaller projects. But here is someone that agrees with you with less qualification than that https://world.hey.com/dhh/turbo-8-is-dropping-typescript-701...
I was introduced to this decision from the Lex Fridman/DHH podcast. He talked a lot about typescript making meta programming very hard. I can see how that would be the case but I don't really understand what sort of meta programming you can do with JS. The general dynamic-ness of it I get.
jraph
> <!doctype html> is what you want for consistent rendering. Or <!DOCTYPE HTML> if you prefer writing markup like it’s 1998. Or even <!doCTypE HTml> if you eschew all societal norms. It’s case-insensitive so they’ll all work.
And <!DOCTYPE html> if you want polyglot (X)HTML.
theandrewbailey
I often reach for the HTML5 boilerplate for things like this:
https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/dist/ind...
xg15
There is some irony in then-Facebook's proprietary metadata lines being in there (the "og:..." lines). Now with their name being "Meta", it looks even more proprietary than before.
Maybe the name was never about the Metaverse at all...
zelphirkalt
Are they proprietary? How? Isn't open graph a standard and widely implemented by many parties, including many open source softwares?
FoxBJK
They're not, at all. It was invented by Facebook, but it's literally just a few lines of metadata that applications can choose to read if they want.
fud101
how do you find this when you need it?
Aransentin
Note that <html> and <body> auto-close and don't need to be terminated.
Also, wrapping the <head> tags in an actual <head></head> is optional.
You also don't need the quotes as long the attribute doesn't have spaces or the like; <html lang=en> is OK.
(kind of pointless as the average website fetches a bazillion bytes of javascript for every page load nowadays, but sometimes slimming things down as much as possible can be fun and satisfying)
zelphirkalt
This kind of thing will always just feel shoddy to me. It is not much work to properly close a tag. The number of bytes saved is negligible, compared to basically any other aspect of a website. Avoiding not needed div spam already would save more. Or for example making sure CSS is not bloated. And of course avoiding downloading 3MB of JS.
What this achieves is making the syntax more irregular and harder to parse. I wish all these tolerances wouldn't exist in HTML5 and browsers simply showed an error, instead of being lenient. It would greatly simplify browser code and HTML spec.
shiomiru
> It would greatly simplify browser code and HTML spec.
I doubt it would make a dent - e.g. in the "skipping <head>" case, you'd be replacing the error recovery mechanism of "jump to the next insertion mode" with "display an error", but a) you'd still need the a code path to handle it, b) now you're in the business of producing good error messages which is notoriously difficult.
Something that would actually make the parser a lot simpler is removing document.write, which has been obsolete ever since the introduction of the DOM and whose main remaining real world use-case seems to be ad delivery. (If it's not clear why this would help, consider that document.write can write scripts that call document.write, etc.)
bentley
Implicit elements and end tags have been a part of HTML since the very beginning. They introduce zero ambiguity to the language, they’re very widely used, and any parser incapable of handling them violates the spec and would be incapable of handling piles of real‐world strict, standards‐compliant HTML.
> I wish all these tolerances wouldn't exist in HTML5 and browsers simply showed an error, instead of being lenient.
They (W3C) tried that with XHTML. It was soundly rejected by webpage authors and by browser vendors. Nobody wants the Yellow Screen of Death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yellow_screen_of_death.pn...
ifwinterco
You're not alone, this is called XHTML and it was tried but not enough people wanted to use it
zelphirkalt
Yeah, I remember, when I was at school and first learning HTML and this kind of stuff. When I stumbled upon XHTML, I right away adapted my approach to verify my page as valid XHTML. Guess I was always on this side of things. Maybe machine empathy? Or also human empathy, because someone needs to write those parsers and the logic to process this stuff.
sevenseacat
oh man, I wish XHTML had won the war. But so many people (and CMSes) were creating dodgy markup that simply rendered yellow screens of doom, that no-one wanted it :(
Aransentin
I agree for sure, but that's a problem with the spec, not the website. If there are multiple ways of doing something you might as well do the minimal one. The parser will have always to be able to handle all the edge cases no matter what anyway.
You might want always consistently terminate all tags and such for aesthetic or human-centered (reduced cognitive load, easier scanning) reasons though, I'd accept that.
chrismorgan
<html>, <head> and <body> start and end tags are all optional. In practice, you shouldn’t omit the <html> start tag because of the lang attribute, but the others never need any attributes. (If you’re putting attributes or classes on the body element, consider whether the html element is more appropriate.) It’s a long time since I wrote <head>, </head>, <body>, </body> or </html>.
nodesocket
Didn't know you can omit <head> .. </head> but I prefer for clarify to keep them.
bentley
Do you also spell out the implicit <tbody> in all your tables for clarity?
ndegruchy
I do.
`<thead>` and `<tfoot>`, too, if they're needed. I try to use all the free stuff that HTML gives you without needing to reach for JS. It's a surprising amount. Coupled with CSS and you can get pretty far without needing anything. Even just having `<template>` with minimal JS enables a ton of 'interactivity'.
christophilus
Yes. Explicit is almost always better than implicit, in my experience.
chrismorgan
> <html lange="en">
s/lange/lang/
> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0">
Don’t need the “.0”. In fact, the atrocious incomplete spec of this stuff <https://www.w3.org/TR/css-viewport-1/> specifies using strtod to parse the number, which is locale dependent, so in theory on a locale that uses a different decimal separator (e.g. French), the “.0” will be ignored.
I have yet to test whether <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.5"> misbehaves (parsing as 1 instead of 1½) with LC_NUMERIC=fr_FR.UTF-8 on any user agents.
cousin_it
Wow. This reminds me of Google Sheets formulas, where function parameters are separated with , or ; depending on locale.
layer8
Given that world is about evenly split on the decimal separator [0] (and correspondingly on the thousands grouping separator), it’s hard to avoid. You could standardize on “;” as the argument separator, but “1,000” would still remain ambiguous.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...
WA
Try Apple Numbers, where even function names are translated and you can’t copy & paste without an error if your locale is, say, German.
Moru
Not to mention the functions are also translated to the other language. I think both these are the fault of Excel to be honest. I had this problem long before Google came around.
And it's really irritating when you have the computer read something out to you that contains numbers. 53.1 km reads like you expect but 53,1 km becomes "fifty-three (long pause) one kilometer".
cubefox
> Not to mention the functions are also translated to the other language.
This makes a lot of sense when you recognize that Excel formulas, unlike proper programming languages, aren't necessarily written by people with a sufficient grasp of the English language, especially when it comes to more abstract mathematical concepts, which aren't taught in secondary English language classes at school, but it in their native language mathematics classes.
simulo
Oh, good to know that it depends on locale, I always wondered about that behavior!
troupo
The behaviour predates Google Sheets and likely comes from Excel (whose behavior Sheets emulate/reverse engineer in many places). And I wouldn't be surprised if Excel got it from Lotus.
lapcat
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0">
isolay
The "without meta utf-8" part of course depends on your browser's default encoding.
kevin_thibedeau
What mainstream browsers aren't defaulting to utf-8 in 2025?
layer8
I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t for pages loaded from local file URIs.
akho
html5 does not even allow any other values in <meta charset=>. I think you need to use a different doctype to get what the screenshot shows.
naniwaduni
All of them, pretty much.
irarelycomment
[dead]
hlava
It's 2025, the end of it. Is this really necessary to share?
nonethewiser
Feels even more important to share honestly. It's unexamined boilerplate at this point.
4ndrewl
Yes. Knowledge is not equally distributed.
troupo
Every day you can expect 10000 people learning a thing you thought everyone knew: https://xkcd.com/1053/
To quote the alt text: "Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time."
Fun fact: both HN and (no doubt not coincidentally) paulgraham.com ship no DOCTYPE and are rendered in Quirks Mode. You can see this in devtools by evaluating `document.compatMode`.
I ran into this because I have a little userscript I inject everywhere that helps me copy text in hovered elements (not just links). It does:
[...document.querySelectorAll(":hover")].at(-1)
to grab the innermost hovered element. It works fine on standards-mode pages, but it's flaky on quirks-mode pages.
Question: is there any straightforward & clean way as a user to force a quirks-mode page to render in standards mode? I know you can do something like:
document.write("<!DOCTYPE html>" + document.documentElement.innerHTML);
but that blows away the entire document & introduces a ton of problems. Is there a cleaner trick?