Oh I actually quoted the website's source. They have that DTD meta crap in there.
But I think you can just do <html> nowadays and it empirically just works. Seriously, screw the anti-DRY people that want me to put some !DOCTYPE or xmlns tags with some W3C links or some DTD nonsense inside ... I should only have to specify "html" exactly once, no more.
If I had designed the spec I would have just made it
Incredibly more readable, and memorizable. A markup language (literally), by virtue of being a markup language, should not be impossible to memorize. Making scary strings like "-//W3C///DTD" part of the spec is counterproductive.
That's SGML tag inference at work (theoretically at least, since browsers have HTML parsing rules hardcoded). SGML knows, by the DOCTYPE declaration, that the document must start with an "html" element, so it infers it if it isn't there. Next, by the content model declared for the "html" element (normally obtained via the ugly public identifier that sibling comments complain about), a "head" element is expected, so SGML infers it as well if it's declared omissible, and so on.
In the "old days", web pages were often just the bare content (no html, head, body containers, no DOCTYPE declaration). A few sites also featured just the body tag (and respective content) for setting the background attribute for the page background color.
E.g., this is the entire code of Netscape's first home page:
<TITLE>Welcome to Mosaic Communications Corporation!</TITLE>
<CENTER>
<A HREF="MCOM/index2.html"><IMG SRC="MCOM/images/mcomwelcome1.gif" BORDER=1></A>
<H3>
<A HREF="MCOM/index2.html">Click on the Image or here to advance</A>
</H3>
</CENTER>
But I think you can just do <html> nowadays and it empirically just works. Seriously, screw the anti-DRY people that want me to put some !DOCTYPE or xmlns tags with some W3C links or some DTD nonsense inside ... I should only have to specify "html" exactly once, no more.
If I had designed the spec I would have just made it
Incredibly more readable, and memorizable. A markup language (literally), by virtue of being a markup language, should not be impossible to memorize. Making scary strings like "-//W3C///DTD" part of the spec is counterproductive.