On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, anarkissed wrote:
> Now I'm cornfuzzled. I write my html with nothing but the barest amount of
> code necessary to get the page to show as I want it to. This means the
> header is nearly empty. Since my preferred browser on my primary machine
> is IE6.0, I'd say it DOESN'T need that doctype line! Does Arachne require
> it or not?
HTML is a markup language. The elements and
attributes of each version are specified by the W3C
(shorthand for World Wide Web Consortium). If you
wish to write your document "correctly," then you begin
it with a DTD line.
Specifically:
"A valid HTML document declares what version of
HTML is used in the document."
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.1
Overall HTML 4.x Table of Contents:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/
The W3C has a validator at their site which parses
a document and checks for standards compliance.
In order for the validator to know which standard to
use to check your page, of course it must first know
which version of HTML standard to apply...
If your page is written to be standards-compliant,
yet doesn't render "correctly" in your browser, then
it's a bug in the browser. If your document is NOT
standards-compliant, then how would you ever know
whether the problem is with your HTML, or with your
browser? So, you can see why any browser bug-checking
needs to be done with "pure" HTML.
Go to http://validator.w3.org and enter the URI
for whatever page you wish to check, and see what
happens.
- Steve
