Have I Mentioned That The HTML5 DOCTYPE Makes Me Smile?

Posted on October 30, 2009 by Rob Larsen

It does.

Why?

Well, I’ve been doing this job, at a very high level, for a long time and I couldn’t code this by hand if you paid me $50,000:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

I understand it, and I can’t remember it. That’s basically gibberish to most people. There’s no way anyone is going to remember that string.

This? This I can code by hand and pretty much anyone can “get” what it’s doing:

<!DOCTYPE html >

I do wonder if there’s been any backlash against that? I’ve seen a lot of backlash against HTML5 over the past year, but I can’t really remember anyone complaining about the doctype declaration.

I bet someone hates it.

Not me :)

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2 Responses to "Have I Mentioned That The HTML5 DOCTYPE Makes Me Smile?"

  • By Andy Vaughn October 30, 2009 - 1:34 pm

    You’ve always been able to do that – look at Google’s doctype. The only downside is that you cannot validate your doctype when you don’t include it in the head. And, since there is no validator for HTML5 *yet* you don’t have anything to add. So, it’s sort of a new discovery for most to achieve something that’s always been available.

  • By Rob Larsen October 30, 2009 - 2:18 pm

    Good points. I was really just admiring the choice in context of the specification as a specification. I think the simple doctype is good. I have similar thoughts about many of the features brought in from the cold (innerHTML springs to mind.)

    I’m using the doctype now and, through modernizr, some of the new semantic markup elements but it’s not quite what it will be in the future when everything surrounding the new standard is in place.

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