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HTML Link Positioning Answer is incorrect

See original GitHub issue

Since the HTML5 specification it is no longer recommended to include the optional <head> tag.

https://google.github.io/styleguide/htmlcssguide.html#Optional_Tags

The body tag is also not always required. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#syntax-tag-omission

Including both of these tags just increase the amount the browser must parse before rendering the page. It also increase the payload size.

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 4 years ago
Comments:7 (1 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

1reaction

kdgyimahcommented, Sep 22, 2021

Since the HTML5 specification it is no longer recommended to include the optional <head> tag.

https://google.github.io/styleguide/htmlcssguide.html#Optional_Tags

The body tag is also not always required. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#syntax-tag-omission

Including both of these tags just increase the amount the browser must parse before rendering the page. It also increase the payload size.

Including the <head> and <body> tag increases the payload size? I can understand the need to optimize for performance and fast loading times, but I should think there are far better ways of solving this. I.e

Compressing and optimizing your images. (Either using the WebP/JPEG 2000/JPEG XR image format, Lazyloading, etc.)
Caching your site
Deferred loading for CSS and JS files
Minifying the files
Leveraging on CDNs

I should think there are more ways than this but removing the <head> and <body> tag sounds like trouble, considering Browser support may not be there yet for the user who may be visiting your site or application? I think it is best to leave it as is @Millsky 🙂

0reactions

yangshuncommented, Sep 7, 2022

Agree with what @kdgyimah said. The performance gains are likely to not be significant enough to warrant this change. The Hacker News comments outlines more issues with doing this.

But I’ll modify the answer to inform readers about this.