Jens Oliver Meiert

The Magic of the Most Minimal HTML Possible (and Why We Don’t Make Use of It)

Published on May 27, 2025, filed under , , , , (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)

Look at this page, in Firefox (more in a second):

Screenshot of the unassuming test page in Firefox.
“How minimal can HTML be?”

Not that spectacular, sure.

Now look at the page’s markup:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<title>✨</title>

Note that this is conformant and valid. That is, it’s not fantasy—non-standard, made-up, defunct—HTML that we find on… most websites.

Also note the miniscule payload.

But what’s going on here?

Two things:

  1. Pushing hard on HTML. (Too hard, actually, when we push out the content.)
  2. Fully separating structure and presentation.

Pushing so hard on HTML that only the strictly necessary code remains is something few frontend developers do.

The biggest reasons are:

  1. We teach to write HTML, the XHTML way.
  2. Our tooling also emits HTML, the XHTML way.
  3. We question semantics more than necessity (observation, not judgment).

That is, to push hard on HTML, we need to learn to write HTML, the HTML way.

One starting point is to learn what HTML code is optional.

The next point is to decide on our HTML writing style.

Fully separating structure and presentation and making use of the HTTP Link header is a different animal.

It’s only supported in Firefox.

There are (have been?) plans to drop support entirely 🦊-whose-head-explodes-emoji

Why is all of this?

In a nutshell:

Our organizations and we ourselves love redoing.

When all we do is redo, we don’t properly maintain.

When we don’t properly maintain, we drop support for things that make things easier to maintain.

But this way of embedding style sheets is actually super-exciting.

We define our style sheet once—

—and that’s it 🤯

(We can still update and change and do anything we want with it.)

Yet, taking a step back, we don’t appreciate this.

We learn and we teach XHTML–HTML, even though everywhere else, we frown upon anything XML.

And we toss everything out all the time for the newest library, framework, system, platform, not iterating over it until we’re good at it.

So where were we? 🙂

HTML is pretty awesome, and the field isn’t getting anywhere near the maximum out of it.

(Yet we could.)

And that’s that, a little thread about minimal HTML, a polished version of a series of tweets from a couple of years ago.

About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on November 9, 2024.

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a web developer, manager, and author. I’ve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you’ve never heard of and companies you use every day, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)