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- <!DOCTYPE html>: you have the modern HTML standard at https://html.spec.whatwg.org/ bookmarked now, you're not making terrible Microsoft Internet Explorer 5-only broken pages, the browser doesn't have to use ~*~quirks mode~*~. Stick this at the very top.
- <html lang="en">: If most of the page is in one language - this one is English - then you can tell the browser that so language-dependent stuff can use that. Use the ISO 639 abbreviations. I think. (Correction: BCP 47, not ISO 639. It's a subset, I think.) Anyway, if part of your page is in another language, you can put lang="whatever" on the element containing the other-language part. (Or, like, wrap it in <span lang="whatever"></span> if you don't have one.)
- <meta charset="UTF-8">: Did you make your HTML files using UTF-8? It should be an option in, like, the Save As dialog or something. Anyway, if you did, you can put this in the <head></head> part so the browser knows it's not Windows-1252 or something.
- Edit: If your server declares a character encoding in an HTTP header, this line will do nothing. It looks like Neocities doesn't do it for our site, though, so we still need it.
- <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">: Okay, so, you didn't use any tables for layout, right? And you still don't understand CSS or Javascript? Okay, then your website probably works fine on, like, a tiny screen. You can check this by zooming in like 500% or opening it in a small window or, idk, both. Anyway, the viewport thing tells mobile browsers that they can just display your site normally and it'll all be good.
Folks who learned HTML in the past fifteen years, feel free to chime in with more hot tips. Because we need them. Please.
(Link to Indiepocalypse HTML tips thread, because which a number of folks did, in fact, chime in.)
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