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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Don’t delete.me

Paul Sowden is the blogger who inspired me to start my own blog over a year ago. He’s restarted his blog at a new domain: delete.me.uk. Let’s hope the new site doesn’t live up to its name. Oh, and be sure to view source for Paul’s own special brand of minimalist valid HTML 4.

Posted 15th September 2003 at 11:12 am

This is Don’t delete.me by Simon Willison, posted on 15th September 2003.

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6 comments

  1. Yes, I would have to agree the HTML 4.01 in question is fairly minimalist; within HTML the start and end tags for the HTML, HEAD and BODY elements being optional, etc.

    That's the main reason why I abandoned HTML 4.01 many years back, but at least he is doing the correct thing by keeping the them as 'optional'.

    Robert Wellock - 15th September 2003 12:22 - #

  2. That kind of minimalism should be illegal LOL. I wasn't aware you could leave out so much. It makes for a very small file footprint, so I'm sure that sort of authoring style has a market somewhere in web design.

    Simon Jessey - 15th September 2003 12:38 - #

  3. By far the most elite domain extension ;)

    Tom Gilder - 15th September 2003 13:24 - #

  4. Wow. In the 6.5 years I've been web developing, I never knew HTML tags were optional. I really should read the spec more!

    Andrew Bowden - 15th September 2003 17:20 - #

  5. It's done as a gimmick, and not to save space, of course. If that had been his aim, he wouldn't have added comments. Neither would he have taken the time to encode the quotation marks and the apostrophes (specially since they won't display in some browsers anyway). What would it save, anyway? - about half a percent of the file-size - if that.

    Michael - 15th September 2003 23:16 - #

  6. Hmm, although I'm right now working with xhtml1.1, I've been coding in that style sometimes... a little list. It sure makes development of an experiment fast, even if it sometimes produces strange css bugs when you try to do things with the html tag or the body tag.

    Interesting to see him go from one of the first 'application/xhtml+xml' sites to minimalistic html4, however. It's usually the other way around...

    Liorean - 17th September 2003 22:56 - #

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