The doctype should always be the first item at the top of any HTML file. In the case of HTML files, it means the specific version and flavor of HTML. A doctype is simply a way to tell the browser - or any other parser - what type of document it’s looking at. Your HTML5 template needs to start with a document type declaration, or doctype. Other than the document type declaration and element, the elements listed above will mostly be found inside the section of the HTML template. Open Graph meta elements for social cards.The document type declaration (or doctype).The Anatomy of an HTML5 TemplateĪn HTML template typically includes the following parts: If you’d rather just grab the code now and read this article later, here’s our finished HTML5 template. We’ll walk through the essential elements of an HTML template, ending with a basic template that you can take with you and build upon. In this article, we’ll look at how to get started with building your own HTML5 boilerplate. This is definitely worth doing, and there are many starting points online to help you build your own HTML5 template. This character provides a signature for the encoding used.As you learn HTML5 and add new techniques to your toolbox, you’re likely going to want to build yourself an HTML boilerplate to start off all future projects.

This is the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode byte order mark (BOM), and is commonly referred to as a UTF-8 BOM even though it is not relevant to byte order.įor HTML5 document, you can use a Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) character at the start of the file. Many Windows programs (including Windows Notepad) add the bytes 0圎F, 0xBB, 0xBF at the start of any document saved as UTF-8. Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM)Ī byte order mark (BOM) consists of the character code U+FEFF at the beginning of a data stream, where it can be used as a signature defining the byte order and encoding form, primarily of unmarked plaintext files. You can use a element with a charset attribute that specifies the encoding within the first 512 bytes of the HTML5 document.Ībove syntax replaces the need for although that syntax is still allowed. Print 'Content-Type: text/html charset=utf-8 ' If you are writing cgi or similar program then you would use HTTP Content-Type header to set any character encoding. HTML 5 authors have three means of setting the character encoding − HTTP Content-Type Header To validate or display an HTML document, a program must choose a character encoding. A character encoding is a method of converting bytes into characters.

Html5 character encoding list