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graup
To save you a click to the dedicated website, this is all there is to it:

  <!doctype html>
  <html lang="en">
  <head>
      <meta charset="utf-8">
      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
      <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge">
      <meta name="description" content="">
      <title>Minimal base.html</title>
  </head>
  </html>
a-leila
Thanks for sharing but the body tag was missing. so here's the complete one:

<!doctype html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> <meta name="description" content=""> <title>Minimal base.html</title> </head> <body> </body> </html>

brianzelip
Another, less network intensive, way to quickly produce an html starting boilerplate, is to use a snippet tool in your editor, like Emmet, https://www.emmet.io/.

My bang snippet, `! + <tab>`, outputs:

  ```html
  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html lang="en">
    <head>
      <meta charset="UTF-8" />
      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
      <title>Document</title>
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/main.css" />
      <meta
      name="description"
      content="" />
      <meta name="author" content="Brian Zelip" />
      <link rel="author" href="https://zelip.me" />
    </head>
    <body>
    </body>
  </html>
  ```
chrismorgan
FYI: the trailing slash is completely useless on HTML tags in the HTML serialisation. It doesn’t close HTML tags, it’s just ignored by the parser for XML compatibility. I advise against including it, because it’s simple visual noise, and misleading (people may come to think they can close tags that way, as in XML; but you can’t, and it’s only valid on empty elements like <meta>, <link> and <img>).
chrismorgan
I’d remove several lines.

----

  <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge">
This was basically always the default for IE, and for almost the last decade has been, I think, pretty superfluous. It’s a holdover from IE7–9 days, and to instruct those extremely rare devices which had changed the actual browser default (which was never easy to do, but which is extremely difficult by IE11) not to operate in compatibility mode for this site.

Plus IE is dead, so you shouldn’t care about IE to any meaningful extent anyway.

----

  <head>
  </head>
  <body>
  </body>
  </html>
<html>, <head> and <body> elements can be omitted if they have no attributes. I like to omit them.

----

  <meta name="description" content="">
Unless you’re careful about this, it’s easy to do more harm than good. I’m not convinced it belongs in an “absolute minimum base.html”.

----

And one more that I’m not certain about: the `, initial-scale=1.0` in the viewport declaration. I think it’s been unnecessary for the past five or six years, that it was basically just a way of working around a bug in iOS Safari that has since been fixed, but I don’t have any iOS device handy with which I can test this.

This is my typical starting point:

  <!doctype html>
  <html lang=en-AU>
  <meta charset=utf-8>
  <meta name=viewport content="width=device-width">
  <title>…</title>
joshspankit
Can confirm that ‘initial-scale=1.0’ is still meaningfully important. Mostly for mobile devices (including Safari on still in-use versions of iOS)
wilt
Don't most editors have snippets for this?