Re: doctype

At 07:53 AM 10/3/01 -0400, Lisa Bradshaw wrote:
>I've noticed a couple of things the doctype declaration does. I'm working on
>a tutorial web page using XHTML and CSS. For some reason IE6 doesn't like
>this doctype. For example, I had some colored scroll bars on my page that
>worked fine in IE5.5 but as soon as I upgraded to IE6 my scrollbars didn't
>work. Hmmm. At first I just thought that IE6 no longer supported this
>feature, but then I came across other web sites with colored scroll bars
>that worked fine.  I spent many hours trying to figure out why mine didn't
>work. After looking at the source of these other pages I came to notice that
>they were all using the doctype html 4.0 transitional declaration. Sure
>enough, when I used that doctype on my page my scroll bars behaved as I
>intended. I realize having colored scroll bars is not a big deal, just a
>nice feature, but it makes me wonder what other things may not work right.
Just a thought.

It's more than just a thought -- you're running up against some of the 
things that were originally intended with a doctype -- the doctype is 
/supposed/ to tell the browser how to render pages. If you use elements 
that aren't *legal* then those elements should not work -- or that's my 
plain English understanding of things.

For more information, 
http://developer.apple.com/internet/_html/doctype.html is a great resource.

FWIW
<tamara />

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