Standards vs. Good Practice about boilerplate-archived

[jeffturcotte]

Can you supply an example document where a particular browser does not render the page correctly without the full/traditional mime-type meta tag? (either over HTTP or by loading a file)

[davetufts]

Good points Matt, but there are so many other things that are more important. Handbook says "HTML pages should begin with by setting utf-8 in the content-type meta tag." Either the long form or short form accomplish that. Boilerplate and the example on Handbook use the short form.

[mattsah]

@jeffturcotte, Nope, to my knowledge all browsers (at least the ones we care about) "parse" the first 512 bytes and look for something like a meta tag with the string charset="utf-8" (and other permuations of it). Paul Irish mentioned this in a talk on HTML5 boilerplate, although I don't remember the details, I'm pretty sure you could do something like <meta who cares what thisdsfoihr2 w8eyf8nf923ht98tr information-0ischarset=utf-8youknow> and it would work. If not that exactly, then certainly something not far off.

This, of course, would not validate, but the principle in which it was pulled into the spec was not based on whether it was valid, as clearly the charset attribute for it was not prior to.

@davetufts, there are always things more important in one fashion or another, but I think it's an issue we can address. I would be in favor of defining it more strictly in handbook if one is contingent on the other.

Perhaps I'm overlooking something, but I actually can't find in handbook, for example, where it says we should use self closing tags on elements which do not have a closing tag. Or that we should use closing tags at all. Maybe I'm completely off base, was an actual decision made that whatever is valid is OK to use? I don't recall this always being the case -- perhaps it was defacto the case simply because we used XHTML and that enforced such rules, and by switching to HTML5 we are throwing those good practices out?

[khamer]

I agree with Dave – there are more important things to worry about. We are staying consistent with bigger, more popular boilerplates like h5bp and Twitter Bootstrap. There's no rule that forces the use of the long or short form, so feel free to use either, but we might as well leave the short form in Boilerplate.

[jeffturcotte]

I want to state for the record that @mattsah is correct: the long form is the "right" way and the HTML5 standard got it wrong. Still, as long as boilerplate uses the HTML5 doctype, we will use its bastardized charset meta tag.