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The minimal valid HTML document

Question

What is the minimal valid HTML document?

I usually start with a template like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Example</title>
  </head>
  <body>

  </body>
</html>

I wonder if that is the minimal HTML document or if a shorter valid HTML document exists.

Answer

You can easily find the minimal HTML document by using the W3C validator.

Start with a document like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Example</title>
  </head>
  <body>

  </body>
</html>

Then try to gradually remove the various tags and see if the document is still valid.

From my testing, this is the shortest valid HTML5 document:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<title>-</title>

This is possible because HTML can automatically infer the presence of tags (e.g. head or body) and the closing of tags (e.g. you can open a tag and avoid to explicitly close it).