Article: Choosing the right doctype for your site
aPaddedCell wrote:
Which Doctype should I use? This is one of the first questions people ask when they start using web standards. There are four main doctypes in use today. This artcile will firstly define what a doctype is and how it works, and then go on to explain the four types and help you to decide which one to use.
Post any comments, suggestions, questions etc. here. I hope you find the article useful! You can find it here:
webwiz posted this at 03:31 — 9th March 2008.
He has: 629 posts
Joined: May 2007
XHTML as XML seems to work fine here in Opera and Firefox.
There is a bug in IE6 - If you include the XML declaration at the top of any XHTML document, or, indeed, even a comment at the top of XHTML or HTML, then IE6 switches to "quirks" mode. Fixed in IE7.
One final point; you raised the issue of character sets and encoding. Some people I know seem to think that you can make a document use Unicode by adding a "charset=utf-8" declaration on the page. Unfortunately, saying it is so does not make it so. I hope your readers will take the time to read the Tutorial: Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS that you thoughtfully included as a reference.
Cordially, David
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delete from internet where user_agent="MSIE" and version < 8;
Megan posted this at 15:30 — 9th March 2008.
She has: 11,421 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
David,
I did mention that about the xml declaration. Maybe you missed it. You're right about the browsers have never properly supported xhtml bit, I should have caught that.
Megan
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webwiz posted this at 00:23 — 10th March 2008.
He has: 629 posts
Joined: May 2007
Sorry. I did miss the bit about the xml declaration.
I also failed to thank you for a great effort in explaining this difficult and contentious subject. Well done!
Cordially, David
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delete from internet where user_agent="MSIE" and version < 8;
JeevesBond posted this at 12:28 — 12th March 2008.
He has: 3,956 posts
Joined: Jun 2002
This is indeed a controversial subject, good article though. Think Megan's choice to recommend XHTML is a good one, there are some issues when it's served as the correct MIME type. If someone understands the MIME type issue, they're probably going to understand the requirements of serving as XML too.
I'm a bit annoyed with all the proponents of going back to tag soup, just because IE doesn't support XML properly!
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