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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

For comparison, this would achieve the same thing now and is much shorter and more memorable:

  <!doctype html>
  <title></title>
  <h1></h1>

(My recollection is that the HTML 4.01 Strict DTD doesn’t trigger quirks mode; if that’s correct, then it should be precisely the same, except for whitespace variation and the actual doctype node. Also neither is valid, because the title element can’t be empty.)

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This is the shortest thing starting with that doctype that I can get validator.w3.org to accept without error or warning:

    <!doctype html><html lang=""><meta charset="UTF-8"><title>x</title>

The ="" there is unnecessary; writing an attribute name only implies an empty value.

If you’re going for shortest valid document at all, <!doctype html> is enough, provided the document exists in a context that makes title optional (e.g. email or <iframe srcdoc>) and that the charset is declared out-of-band.

You may be able to use a UTF BOM instead of the meta tag, or I think someone mentioned elsewhere having the server declare the character encoding in a header. I guess it depends on whether you count the header size which is better for golfing.

I fill in the title and h1 elements - this is just the template. And this version is not precisely the same, because it can't have the same timestamp :).

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