What's a minimally valid HTML5 document?

html, validation, w3c-validation

Solution

The `title` element is indeed required, but as Jukka Korpela notes, it also must be non-empty. Furthermore, the content model of the `title` element is:

Text that is not inter-element whitespace.

Therefore, having just a space character in the `title` element is not considered valid HTML. You can check this in W3C validator.

So, an example of a minimal and valid HTML5 document is the following:

<!doctype html><title>a</title>

Problem

I've just been reading the HTML5 author spec. It states that the `<html>`, `<head>` and `<body>` tags are optional. Does that mean that you can leave them out completely and still have a valid HTML5 document? If I'm interpreting this correctly, it means this should be completely valid: ``` <!DOCTYPE html> <p>Hello!</p> ``` Is this correct? You can check out the spec here: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view/syntax.html#syntax "8.1.2.4 Optional tags" is the bit out about it being OK to omit `<html>`, `<head>` and `<body>`

Original source

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