Re: Document Types (spinoff from stylesheets threads)

by Andrew McFarland <aamcf(at)aamcf.co.uk>

Date:	Mon, 11 Mar 2002 17:26:25 +0000
To:	Nathan <natelyle(at)chartermi.net>
Cc:	HWG Techniques Email List <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
References:	ntlworld
	todo: View Thread, Original

At 11:43 11/03/02 -0500, Nathan wrote:
>What would be the risk of not including a DTD, even if the code validated
>perfectly?

To be honest, not much. It would mean that the page would be rendered in 
quirks mode rather than standards mode in  browsers that look for it. It 
may become a significant issue in the future. It is much easier to deal 
with well formed XHTML than tag-soup HTML. Future browsers may use 
completely separate rendering engines based on DOCTYPE: a nice efficient 
one for nice XHTML tha6 correctly identifies itself, and a not so nice 
chunky error correcting one for everything else.

There are some highly specific circumstances when a DOCTYPE is required and 
not having it will cause problems; but if you are writing for those 
circumstances you will know about them.

Andrew

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