why do you need <!DOCTYPE -blah>? [Archive]

jooli

08.05.2002, 18:21

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

why do you need that tag for it to be standard?
isn't it just so see what type it is?(if it isn't needed, then why is it prefered by most?) and same goes for those META tags

julie (15)
PH2 vault to be opened//quit

Brian Nickel

08.05.2002, 18:32

In all technicality, it was developed to ensure that browsers know exactly what they are looking at. An example of a similar nature is when you look at a GIF in notepad, the first few characters are GIF or GIF89, a Jpeg has JPG, etc. This information is designed so whatever processors read the data can act accordingly.
If a web page has an HTML3.2 doctype it might have different sructure specs that are different than those of HTML4. The same with XHTML.
They are designed also, to tell the difference between an SVG document, a SMIL document, and an HTML document.

.Brian
It is best to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

jooli

08.05.2002, 20:31

what happens if its a combo?
lets say html & xml
but sites work well enough without the tag right?

julie (15)
PH2 vault to be opened//quit

Brian Nickel

08.05.2002, 20:32

It was a decision by browser makers to support non-standards.

.Brian
It is best to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

ttrenka

09.05.2002, 01:07

If you try to combine markup languages, you'll need to use the XML namespacing mechanism to mark off which tags belong to what language....

Chris

11.05.2002, 16:26

if you dont put the correct DOCTYPE in, some browsers can render your page a bit strangely too... plus also you can't validate your page with the W3C validator until a DOCTYPE is there...

[url="http://chrispoole.com"]Chris[/url:h0fnrgz45s]