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Comment by redmagic | Hacker News Reader

This webpage which is a guide to hand coding things appears to not have a closing </head>, </body>, or </html> tag.

That is completely valid HTML5.

https://html5.validator.nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fmeiert.com%2Fe...

That maybe but it differs from what is shown in the inspector (which shows the <head> and <body> tags). This could be confusing as the source html doesn't match how the browser interprets it.

Web inspectors are showing a representation of the DOM, they are not showing the raw source. Netscape and IE used to have "Show Source" functions that literally showed just the page source.

Inspectors will do things like display colors as their RGB triples i.e. rgb(x, y, z) in computed styles when a color has been defined in the HTML like in a body tag or table cell's bgcolor attribute.

All browsers still have show source. It's just not usually that useful anymore.

Yes I am aware. It can be confusing if you are new. I had someone ask me why it was different the other day.

I usually look at the network log for that information now.

Just because it is valid does not mean you should do it.

That's true. The reasons to do it are in the article.

TIL!

Others have pointed out that this validates with automated tools. Here's the parts of the spec:

- "An html element's end tag can be omitted if the html element is not immediately followed by a comment." https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-ht...

- "A head element's end tag can be omitted if the head element is not immediately followed by ASCII whitespace or a comment." https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-he...

- "A body element's end tag can be omitted if the body element is not immediately followed by a comment." https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/sections.html#the-bod...

Personally, I prefer to close all of my elements, it avoids having to worry about accidentally triggering one of these hard-to-spot edge-cases.

And yet, it validates - https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fmeiert.com%2F...

Neither of the three tags you've mentioned are required anymore in HTML5.

They weren’t required before HTML 5 either.

Your tone suggests that you think this is inconsistent.

However, I think it's evidence the author read the specifications as recommended.

The author mentions something about omitting HTML tags and links to another article of his own, which could explain this (I haven't read it yet):

https://meiert.com/en/blog/optional-html/

You do not even need the opening tags for a correct HTML5

It was the case in previous versions of HTML too. Here is my minimal document from 2005: http://rimantas.com/bits/minimal_html.html

That being said, I very much like the spirit of the document. Many many good points.

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