HTML (and XHTML) Base Templates

These templates are the templates that I use when I code a web page "from scratch". It's best to put stylesheets in external .css files and JavaScript code in .js files, but I've included <style> and <script> elements because I often develop code that way at the beginning and then when I'm closer to completion I move the stylesheets and scripts to external files.

If you're developing a new site or project, you should probably use the HTML5 template.

Rememeber to change the charset when you're using a different character set and to change the lang attribute when the content will not primarily be in English.

If you follow best practices and don't use any inline styles or inline event handlers, then you don't need the Content-Style-Type and Content-Script-Type <meta> elements.

HTML 5

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en"><head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title></title>
<style>

</style>
</head>
<body>



<script>

</script>
</body>
</html>

HTML 4.01 Strict

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en"><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript">
<title></title>
<style type="text/css">

</style>
</head>
<body>



<script type="text/javascript"><!--

// -->
</script>
</body>
</html>

XHTML 1.0 Strict

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript" />
<title></title>
<style type="text/css">/* <![CDATA[ */

/* ]]> */</style>
</head>
<body>



<script type="text/javascript"><!--//--><![CDATA[//><!--

//--><!]]>
</script>
</body>
</html>
Last update: 2024-03-06