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Comment by skymt | Hacker News Reader

You don't even need <html>. <https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-ht...>

This is a valid HTML5 document:

    <!doctype html>
    <title>This is valid!</title>
    <p>Really, it's valid!

Paste it into the validator yourself if you don't believe me: <https://validator.w3.org/nu/#textarea>

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That's SGML tag inference at work (theoretically at least, since browsers have HTML parsing rules hardcoded). SGML knows, by the DOCTYPE declaration, that the document must start with an "html" element, so it infers it if it isn't there. Next, by the content model declared for the "html" element (normally obtained via the ugly public identifier that sibling comments complain about), a "head" element is expected, so SGML infers it as well if it's declared omissible, and so on.

In the "old days", web pages were often just the bare content (no html, head, body containers, no DOCTYPE declaration). A few sites also featured just the body tag (and respective content) for setting the background attribute for the page background color.

E.g., this is the entire code of Netscape's first home page:

    <TITLE>Welcome to Mosaic Communications Corporation!</TITLE>
    <CENTER>
    <A HREF="MCOM/index2.html"><IMG SRC="MCOM/images/mcomwelcome1.gif" BORDER=1></A>
    <H3>
    <A HREF="MCOM/index2.html">Click on the Image or here to advance</A>
    </H3>
    </CENTER>

http://home.mcom.com/

I LOVE <center> and still use it sometimes because it's too goddamn complicated to center anything days.

"margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;" what the F???

"width:500px;margin-left:-250px;left:50%;" what the #$#$@?

Are they kidding?

Wow, I didn't actually know that. That feels...so dirty!

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