diff --git a/gitweb/gitweb.perl b/gitweb/gitweb.perl
index 606b50104c..1835487ab2 100755
--- a/gitweb/gitweb.perl
+++ b/gitweb/gitweb.perl
@@ -4219,7 +4219,10 @@ sub git_header_html {
 	my $mod_perl_version = $ENV{'MOD_PERL'} ? " $ENV{'MOD_PERL'}" : '';
 	print <<EOF;
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
-<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<!DOCTYPE html [
+	<!ENTITY nbsp "&#xA0;">
+	<!ENTITY sdot "&#x22C5;">
+]>
 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-US" lang="en-US">
 <!-- git web interface version $version, (C) 2005-2006, Kay Sievers <kay.sievers\@vrfy.org>, Christian Gierke -->
 <!-- git core binaries version $git_version -->
diff --git a/t/t9502-gitweb-standalone-parse-output.sh b/t/t9502-gitweb-standalone-parse-output.sh
index 8cb582f0e6..81d5625557 100755
--- a/t/t9502-gitweb-standalone-parse-output.sh
+++ b/t/t9502-gitweb-standalone-parse-output.sh
@@ -220,4 +220,18 @@ test_expect_success 'no http-equiv="content-type" in XHTML' '
 	no_http_equiv_content_type "p=.git;a=tree"
 '
 
+proper_doctype() {
+	gitweb_run "$@" &&
+	grep -F "<!DOCTYPE html [" gitweb.body &&
+	grep "<!ENTITY nbsp" gitweb.body &&
+	grep "<!ENTITY sdot" gitweb.body
+}
+
+test_expect_success 'Proper DOCTYPE with entity declarations' '
+	proper_doctype &&
+	proper_doctype "p=.git" &&
+	proper_doctype "p=.git;a=log" &&
+	proper_doctype "p=.git;a=tree"
+'
+
 test_done
