Can comments appear before the DOCTYPE declaration?

Question

I would like to place a comment ( style) at the very top of my HTML code, preceding the DOCTYPE declaration. Does this conform to the standar

Answer 1

Writing the first is certainly best practice.

I remember strange problems a long, long time ago where some browser (probably IE6) ignored a because there was something seemingly innocent before it - I think just whitespace, but maybe it was a comment. In any case, it was a horrible, horrible bug to have to track down, and there's certainly never any good reason to have comments or whitespace before the .

Writing the first is, I'd say, just something experienced web developers do to avoid horrible, elusive bugs.