Correct DOCTYPE in header

registered · Regular Joined: Feb 16, 2005 Posts: 67 Location: Canada

Hello everyone, I have been wondering about the correct DOCTYPE to put in the header. As of this moment I have this:

Code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

But from what I have been reading it should be:

Code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Using the W3C Validator it shows compliant either way, the only difference that I can see is that when viewing in FireFox all text is centered(posts, blocks, everything) when using the second type from above.

From what I understand is that each browser has it's own DOM and by using the second type from above forces all browsers to use the W3C DOM instead? If this is true, why does the site render differently in the different browsers with the second type but not with the first DOCTYPE?

Sells PC To Pay For Divorce Joined: Posts: 5661

maybe looking at this would be usefull..

http://htmlhelp.org/tools/validator/doctype.html

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

The question is whether to be the best or okay as far as compliancy. I would always use the first one.

Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2005 11:58 am

That is what I firgured as well Smile

Posted: Sun Oct 16, 2005 1:23 pm

It really depends on how compliant your domain is.

This is the reason why it is by default set to the lesser value.

If you can test your domain using the latter (with every browser type and version) and you can see the primary pages and "table inside of table" pages (for example the supporters module) as well as forum posts, then you can use the DTD method!

The reason for Nuke using this downgraded default configuration is that the former level puts the latest (5.0 IE and Gecko) browsers into Quirks compatibility mode so that they run like older browser versions; however doing so has an inherant performance cost to those browser sessions.

What it boils down to is that default PHP-Nuke and many add-ons are not coded properly for W3C compliance and this is what has caused this need to force a lower level of session.

If W3C Compliance was actually achieved, you wouldn't need to use the weaker standard.

On my primary domain, I need to use the first method, but on my fully W3C Compliant domains (both HTML and XHTML) I only use the latter methods of including the DTD type links.