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Comment by bloak | Hacker News Reader

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>

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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.

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