Although HTML5 is not fully supported by modern browsers, there are a couple of things you can start doing right now:
metatag to specify the character set:
You can also safely avoid all the XHTML stuff, including the XML declaration and the XHTML namespace.
This makes the opening of your HTML page simpler:
<!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8">
We will start our HTML files in this way throughout the course.