VanBerghem.Com
«
 
»

Doctype

March 1st, 2008

So what is a DOCTYPE and what is it good for? What does the DOCTYPE do anyway?

There is not just one type of HTML, there are actually many: HTML 4.01 Strict, HTML 4.01 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict, and many more. All these types of HTML are defined in their respective W3C specifications, but they are also defined in a machine-readable language specifying the legal structure, elements and attributes of a type of HTML. Such a definition is called a “Document Type Definition”, or, for short, DTD.
~ Olivier Thereaux

This is used to let the browser know what version of HTML you are using. If you don’t use it, or if you get it wrong, the browser will assume you don’t know what you’re doing and switch to ‘quirks mode’, which will not render things as they should be. Apparently it’s more ‘forgiving’ but it actually seems to be quite random and confusing. The case must be like that in the example below (with upper case ‘DOCTYPE’). It does not close like other tags.
~ Patrick Griffiths – HTML Dog

Example

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

Do note that the DTD greatly influences how you need to formulate your code that follows it. Some DTD’s require extra tags in your document. To make it easy for you, here’s a list.

HTML

HTML 4.01 Transitional

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

HTML 4.01 Strict

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

HTML 4.01 Frameset

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<frameset>
</frameset>
</html>

XHTML

XHTML 1.0 Transitional

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

XHTML 1.0 Strict

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

XHTML 1.0 Frameset

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<frameset>
</frameset>
</html>

XHTML 1.1

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 12:05 and is filed under (X)HTML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.