Monday, August 26, 2013

A Couple More Words About Minimalism

This is a valid minimal HTML 5:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Title of the document</title>
</head>

<body>
The content of the document......
</body>

</html>
But because of its brevity, it leaves a lot of information wanting.  For a spider such as myself, I would expand the document markup to this:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang='en'>

<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>Title of the document</title>
</head>

<body> 
<p>The content of the document...... </p>
</body>

</html>

Notice that only one new tag was added and two more were only expanded.  But this change tells us some very important things:

1) the site is in English and
2) the site has a MIME type of text/htm
3) semantic structure is vastly improved.

With HTML touting its semantic improvements such as <article> and <header> tags why would anyone throw away the <p> tag?

Anyway, this would be my HTML 5 minimal document.

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