HTML5 new Doctype and Charset

HTML5 defines an HTML syntax that is compatible with HTML4 and XHTML1 documents published on the Web. The HTML syntax of HTML5 requires a DOCTYPE to be specified to ensure that the browser renders the page in standards mode. The DOCTYPE declaration is <!DOCTYPE html> and is case-insensitive in the HTML syntax.

For the HTML syntax of HTML5, setting the character encoding is done by using a meta element with a charset attribute that specifies the encoding within the first 1024 bytes of the document. E.g. <meta charset=”UTF-8″> could be used to specify the UTF-8 encoding. This replaces the need for <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″> although that syntax is still allowed.

Following example of a HTML5 web page illustrates the usage of new doctype and charset

<!doctype html>

<html>

<head>

<title>Example document</title>

</head>

<body>

<p>Example paragraph</p>

</body>

</html>