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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

Exactly how much complexity does a closing <html> tag add?

None, but for something that's attempting to generate very simple markup

  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>TITLE</title>

Is nicer than

  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html>
   <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>TITLE</title>
   </head>
   <body>
    
    </body>
  </html>

The <html> is also optional here.[1]

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>TITLE</title>

Look at that, I saved you another indent.

I think the recent Google Style Guide [2] has made this en vogue, but hipster points for anyone who knew about it before.

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

[2] http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/htmlcssgui...

The character set is also optional if sent as an http header.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html#h-5.2.2

And a supporting talk by paul irish http://paulirish.com/2011/primitives-html5-video/

Can I still take the hipster points if I never knew that the second html tag was required? I just always assumed that the new spec rolled the doctype and html declaration into the same thing.

Perhaps my HTML5 introduction pitched it that way, or perhaps I just jump to conclusions too easily, but nice to know I've gotten it right, even if only by accident.

Yup. I write all my personal web pages like this now. It's far more efficient, simply because it's less stuff to forget, easier to remember, and much quicker to type.

How often are you actually typing </html>, <head>, and <body> that it actually makes you less efficient? This reminds me of all the ASI discussions that have been going on lately.

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