Don't forget these tags to make HTML work like you expect

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/dont-forget-these-html-tags/

49•FromTheArchives•2h ago

Comments

theandrewbailey•2h ago

I often reach for the HTML5 boilerplate for things like this:

https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/dist/ind...

xg15•51m ago

There is some irony in then-Facebook's proprietary metadata lines being in there (the "og:..." lines). Now with their name being "Meta", it looks even more proprietary than before.

Maybe the name was never about the Metaverse at all...

zelphirkalt•23m ago

Are they proprietary? How? Isn't open graph a standard and widely implemented by many parties, including many open source softwares?

chrismorgan•57m ago

> <html lange="en">

s/lange/lang/

> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0">

Don’t need the “.0”. In fact, the atrocious incomplete spec of this stuff <https://www.w3.org/TR/css-viewport-1/> specifies using strtod to parse the number, which is locale dependent, so in theory on a locale that uses a different decimal separator (e.g. French), the “.0” will be ignored.

I have yet to test whether <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.5"> misbehaves (parsing as 1 instead of 1½) with LC_NUMERIC=fr_FR.UTF-8 on any user agents.

cousin_it•31m ago

Wow. This reminds me of Google Sheets formulas, where function parameters are separated with , or ; depending on locale.

noja•27m ago

Same as Excel and LibreOffice surely?

KoolKat23•11m ago

Yes

troupo•25m ago

The behaviour predates Google Sheets and likely comes from Excel (whose behavior Sheets emulate/reverse engineer in many places). And I wouldn't be surprised if Excel got it from Lotus.

Moru•21m ago

Not to mention the functions are also translated to the other language. I think both these are the fault of Excel to be honest. I had this problem long before Google came around.

And it's really irritating when you have the computer read something out to you that contains numbers. 53.1 km reads like you expect but 53,1 km becomes "fifty-three (long pause) one kilometer".

simulo•13m ago

Oh, good to know that it depends on locale, I always wondered about that behavior!

Aransentin•53m ago

Note that <html> and <body> auto-close and don't need to be terminated.

Also, wrapping the <head> tags in an actual <head></head> is optional.

You also don't need the quotes as long the attribute doesn't have spaces or the like; <html lang=en> is OK.

(kind of pointless as the average website fetches a bazillion bytes of javascript for every page load nowadays, but sometimes slimming things down as much as possible can be fun and satisfying)

chrismorgan•48m ago

<html>, <head> and <body> start and end tags are all optional. In practice, you shouldn’t omit the <html> start tag because of the lang attribute, but the others never need any attributes. (If you’re putting attributes or classes on the body element, consider whether the html element is more appropriate.) It’s a long time since I wrote <head>, </head>, <body>, </body> or </html>.

zelphirkalt•24m ago

This kind of thing will always just feel shoddy to me. It is not much work to properly close a tag. The number of bytes saved is negligible, compared to basically any other aspect of a website. Avoiding not needed div spam already would save more. Or for example making sure CSS is not bloated. And of course avoiding downloading 3MB of JS.

What this achieves is making the syntax more irregular and harder to parse. I wish all these tolerances wouldn't exist in HTML5 and browsers simply showed an error, instead of being lenient. It would greatly simplify browser code and HTML spec.

ifwinterco•13m ago

You're not alone, this is called XHTML and it was tried but not enough people wanted to use it

sevenseacat•10m ago

oh man, I wish XHTML had won the war. But so many people (and CMSes) were creating dodgy markup that simply rendered yellow screens of doom, that no-one wanted it :(

Aransentin•12m ago

I agree for sure, but that's a problem with the spec, not the website. If there are multiple ways of doing something you might as well do the minimal one. The parser will have always to be able to handle all the edge cases no matter what anyway.

You might want always consistently terminate all tags and such for aesthetic or human-centered (reduced cognitive load, easier scanning) reasons though, I'd accept that.

bentley•7m ago

Implicit elements and end tags have been a part of HTML since the very beginning. They introduce zero ambiguity to the language, they’re very widely used, and any parser incapable of handling them violates the spec and would be incapable of handling piles of real‐world strict, standards‐compliant HTML.

> I wish all these tolerances wouldn't exist in HTML5 and browsers simply showed an error, instead of being lenient.

They (W3C) tried that with XHTML. It was soundly rejected by webpage authors and by browser vendors. Nobody wants the Yellow Screen of Death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yellow_screen_of_death.pn...

hlava•36m ago

It's 2025, the end of it. Is this really necessary to share?

4ndrewl•28m ago

Yes. Knowledge is not equally distributed.

troupo•24m ago

Every day you can expect 10000 people learning a thing you thought everyone knew: https://xkcd.com/1053/

To quote the alt text: "Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time."

isolay•21m ago

The "without meta utf-8" part of course depends on your browser's default encoding.

ilaksh•12m ago

Anyone else prefer to use web components without bundling?

I probably should not admit this, but I have been using Lit Elements with raw JavaScript code. Because I stopped using autocomplete awhile ago.

I guess not using TypeScript at this point is basically the equivalent for many people these days of saying that I use punch cards.

VPenkov•2m ago

37 Signals [0] famously uses their own Stimulus [1] framework on most of their products. Their CEO is a proponent of the whole no-build approach because of the additional complexity it adds, and because it makes it difficult for people to pop your code and learn from it.

[0]: https://basecamp.com/ [1]: https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/

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