It includes the reset CSS so that you can get your design working consistently across UAs. The JS was included so you could use the fancy new HTML5 in old versions of IE. Seems like a reasonable include. The reset CSS is basically mandatory either way, regardless of what version of HTML you use. I'm not sure what you mean by getting Unicode to work in HTML5. UTF-8 encoding is pretty universal at this point and not dependent on your markup version -- not to mention the existence of character entities. There's a Unicode entity on this very page and this site doesn't even use a doctype: ♥