I learned HTML when XHTML 1.0 was current. I've long preferred strict HTML written using XML. It helps spotting mistakes, and there are no parsing surprise. No

I learned HTML when XHTML 1.0 was current. I've long preferred strict HTML written using XML. It helps spotting mistakes, and there are no parsing surprise. Now that HTML5 parsing is well specified, I've come to think that either you want to be strict and have the browser tell you something is wrong, and you use XHTML for this, or all these optional tags are just useless. I want to optimize readability, and then file size. I believe closing all tags you opened and quoting all attributes helps readability, and also that all these <head>, <body>, <html> tags just get in the way and make your eyes go through useless boilerplate and makes your fingers type useless things too if you don't use templates. You still need to specify the charset so characters are interpreted correctly, so for me, if you are not going to use application/html+xml anyway this works well: <!DOCTYPE html> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title> My title </title> <p> Lorem ipsum... </p> Both quicker to read and write, while not raising maintenance costs. Though just yesterday I edited my resume written in XHTML and the browser actually spotted a dumb mistake, so I still like the strictness of the XML parsing mode. One counterpoint to dropping the optional tags is for pedagogy: if I had to teach HTML to someone, I would make them use all the tags, or the result of having html and body in the DOM and CSS working on them will be very confusing. Only when they understand the DOM, what nodes are in an HTML page, I'd make them drop the tags if they want. Which is an important step so they can understand that nodes that are present in the DOM are not necessarily in the source code.