I\'ve just been reading the HTML5 author spec.
It states that the ,
and
tags are optional
The title element is indeed required, but as Jukka Korpela notes, it also must be non-empty. Furthermore, the content model of the title
element is:
Text that is not inter-element whitespace.
Therefore, having just a space character in the title
element is not considered valid HTML. You can check this in W3C validator.
So, an example of a minimal and valid HTML5 document is the following:
<!doctype html><title>a</title>
This is the minimal HTML5-valid document:
<!doctype html><title> </title>
W3C HTML validator maintainer here. FYI with regard to the validator behavior, as of today, the validator now enforces the requirement in the HTML spec that the title
element must contain at least one non-whitespace character -
http://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=data%3Atext%2Fhtml%3Bcharset%3Dutf-8%2C%3C%2521doctype%2520html%3E%3Ctitle%3E%2520%2520%2520%3C%252Ftitle%3E
While the <html>
, <head>
and <body>
start and end tags are optional, the <title>
tags are required, except in special circumstances, so no, your sample is not (ordinarily) valid.
I think you are reading it correctly. Although browsers will even render incorrect HTML (try breaking the rules and FF will render the same).