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📎 Falsehoods Programmers Believe About HTML

By Artyom Bologov

Web is beautiful.

Web is ugly.

Web is astonishing.

A part of this appeal is HTML, with its historical quirks.

Many a programmer believe many things about HTML.

And some of the beliefs are not necessarily true.

So let's explore some falsehoods programmers believe about HTML.

Language & Parsing (#language)

HTML is just XML. All tags have matching closing tags. (#details)

Some tags (like <li> or <p>) have implicit closing tags:

<li> List item without closing tag
<li> Another list item right after it

HTML is almost XML. All tags have closing tags, even if implicit (#details)

<img> and <input> are self-closing:

<!-- Notice the / here!-->
<input type=text/>

Okay, okay, HTML is not XML. But all elements either have closing tags or self-close (#details)

<br> and <hr> don't even need a self-close slash.

Actually, self-close slash

is mostly optional (and discouraged) in HTML,

so the difference is less pronounced.

Standard (#standard)

HTML is defined by the standard (#details)

It's defined by browser vendors and WHATWG (= browser vendors)

The standard does not change after validation (#details)

The standard is "Living", and you can see (a very recent) date of last change at

Living Standard page.

The standard is self-contained (relating to HTML only) (#details)

HTML is also relating to a group of standards, including DOM and JavaScript.

In fact, many features of HTML are defined as JavaScript classes.

There is only one (two? three?) doctypes for HTML documents (#details)

Oh my sweet summer child...

<!DOCTYPE html>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE math PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD MathML 2.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Math/DTD/mathml2/mathml2.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE math SYSTEM "http://www.w3.org/Math/DTD/mathml1/mathml.dtd">