Re:Doc Type Declarations

by "Eric Hoffman" <EHoffman(at)meagher.com>

Date:	Tue, 15 Sep 1998 10:05:51 -0500
To:	hwg-theory(at)hwg.org
	todo: View Thread, Original

In light of all this Doc Type talk, I have a question suited for "theory" =
<grin>
As we are progressing on the site development for our firm, I have =
followed this validation discussion fairly closely.  For non-profit sites =
I have done, I usually went ahead and validated, yada yada.

But here (and forevermore it feels) we use Cold Fusion a lot.  For those =
of you not familiar with the product..it is fabulous.  Anyhoo, it also =
uses it's own tag set in the mark up......my assumption is that it clearly =
won't validate because of the proprietary tags, and at the same time, I =
could not truly use one of the Doc Type statements.=20

Thoughts or ruminations?

TIA!
Eric J Hoffman
Director of Internet Initiatives
Meagher & Geer, PLLP
Member: HTML Writer's Guild
International Webmasters Assoc.
WebStandards Project

>>> "John M. Allen" <jallen(at)thunder.ocis.temple.edu> 09/14 5:21 PM >>>
Suzanne Corcorran wrote:

> This is not a requirement for web pages,

Actually, it is required for all HTML documents since HTML 3.0.

> but is useful for sending the message to the browser that the document
> conforms to standards,

Actually, most (all?) current browsers ignore the doctype statement.  =
Other
user agents do use the DOCTYPE statement.  The most widely known are
validators.  Also, the DOCTYPE statement does not guarantee that the user
followed the standards.  In fact, it is quite common for people to put in =
a
DOCTYPE statement and then to use markup that is invalid in that DOCTYPE.

> The official W3C definition for <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML
> 4.0//EN">:
>
> This is HTML 4.0 Strict DTD (Document Type Definition),

First, the correct form is:<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML =
4.0//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">
The IETF is no longer working on HTML.  The W3C took over sometime during =
the
formation of version 3.

Second, the DTD is the **entire definition of the version of HTML**. This =
is
only the DOCTYPE element.

Drew Allen

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