Discuss: Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!

by Jeffrey Zeldman

181 Ie 6 Bludgeoning my Site!

This article is fairly useful in giving a basic overview of what to do about choosing the right DTD for the job, but my problem doesn’t seem to be addressed… I’ve got “<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“iso-8859-1”?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>” as the first two lines in all of my pages and yet… no matter what I seem to do… IE6 ALWAYS seems to display them as the collapsible XML source!! What am I doing wrong?? My code validates—IE is just being retarded!

Any ideas?

posted at 04:01 pm on September 16, 2003 by Factory Joe

182 Bludgeoning No More!

So the answer was to move the following three lines together to the top of my pages:

<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“iso-8859-1”?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html >

posted at 04:42 pm on September 16, 2003 by Factory Joe

183 You'll notice...

that the difference is that I moved the <HTML> tag below to !DOCTYPE…

Yeesh.

posted at 04:42 pm on September 16, 2003 by Factory Joe

184 mozilla?

I was trying to validate a page and was told by the validator that I must use a DOCTYPE. I tried the <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”> but it makes my site ignore the CSS in Mozilla and Netscape 7. Is there any simple reason for this without seeing the code?

posted at 01:16 am on September 19, 2003 by sdiddy

185 Still no answer to the missing CSS in Moz & NS7?

After reading through all the pages of the thread which I didn’t realise were there I see that other have the same issue… I still can’t getting it to look right in Moz/NS7 with the DOCTYPE ??? Any ideas please tell me! Email *** miles at streetdaddy dot com ***

posted at 01:34 am on September 19, 2003 by sdiddy

186 false empiric logic

I had great fun to read your articles since it tells the exacts mistakes i’ve done before to find your page : I did Validate w3c home page with w3c html validator, considering good results i copyed this XML doctype on my pages…
I realise now, how people can make the same stupid thinks and how it can be a “kind of false empiric logic”. Thanks !

posted at 04:49 am on September 20, 2003 by

187 Netscape 7 Doctype bug(?)

So here’s the thing. My code validates to HTML 4.01 with the W3C online validator. IE6 renders it perfectly using the strict or transitional DTD’s (standards mode) however Netscape7 loses the pages external stylesheet when in standards mode, so I’ve ended up using a quirks mode 4.01 DTD. Anyone had this problem?

posted at 08:16 am on October 9, 2003 by Rich

188 re: mozilla?

Just read 3 entries up… exactly the same problem

posted at 08:18 am on October 9, 2003 by Rich

189 Still no answer to the missing CSS in Moz & NS7?

Instead of externally linking to your css file, call it as an SSI – sure, it’s a workaround, and depends on you running some flavour of server side scripting, so not ideal but will work.

posted at 06:37 am on October 10, 2003 by Rich

190 Intranet discussion

What are the implications for intranet developers?

Standards are great and much needed. But back to the question of backstage DOCTYPE functionality: does my IIS box cache a copy of the W3 definitions? What if our Cisco box or firewall punts? Does my intranet go down in flames with it? Or on a larger scale, could a rabid pack of mentally unstable geeks hit W3.org with Denial of Services Attacks and take out the whole shooting match? With those risks, I’m better off with no DOCTYPE declaration at all and voluminous <TABLE> and <FONT> tags.

posted at 11:21 am on October 14, 2003 by klemp