Re:Google HTML/CSS style guide suggests omitting head and bo...
by kllrnohj on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @01:07PM
(#19972108)
> having these tags give the document a structure that makes it easier for machines to understand
What is a machine supposed to do with the <html> tag? It's entirely useless and tells you nothing. At best it could be used to identify file type, but the doctype has long since replaced that usage and that still wouldn't justify any reason for the end tag.
Similarly for <head> and <body>. They don't really do anything. There's no machine-useful structure to be had from that.
For some of the optional end tags sure, that definitely helps make things easier for machines to understand. That's why XHTML exists. It's not really used, though, but if you really want easy to understand document structure for machines you wouldn't go anywhere close to HTML in the first place and instead use XHTML.
What is a machine supposed to do with the <html> tag? It's entirely useless and tells you nothing. At best it could be used to identify file type, but the doctype has long since replaced that usage and that still wouldn't justify any reason for the end tag.
Similarly for <head> and <body>. They don't really do anything. There's no machine-useful structure to be had from that.
For some of the optional end tags sure, that definitely helps make things easier for machines to understand. That's why XHTML exists. It's not really used, though, but if you really want easy to understand document structure for machines you wouldn't go anywhere close to HTML in the first place and instead use XHTML.