Document Type Definition — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

XML - XSL - XSLT - XHTML - CSS - DOM

Document Type Definition

This page's ID: 10929

Edit Post

Who can edit a post?	The poster and administrators may edit a post. The poster can only edit it for a short while after the initial post.

Your User Name:
Your Password:
Login Options:	Remember Me On This Computer

Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	"This rule annoyed me a lot. What the hell is the point that let browser do so? Why the hell browser doesn't do job properly without it?" Because, not too long ago, standards were pretty much inexistant. Browser makers made the standards, you could say. They introduced tons of "extras" to HTML, and it started to get out of hand. The W3C came along and both Microsoft and Netscape agreed to consider what they said to be "standard." So more recent browser versions support these standards, which - and this is the important part - means they treat the same HTML code differently than they did before. The problem is that that breaks old pages. An old page, written to be displayed the way browsers displayed it in 1995, viewed on a browser today, would look different because browsers treat the code differently. To avoid this, Todd Farhner (sp?) proposed that browsers use the presence of the DOCTYPE to switch into "standards mode." Since hardly any old pages were made with DOCTYPEs, they will still work in the newer browsers. However, now that designers are starting to learn the importance of DOCTYPEs, they're creating pages that make use of the newer standards. And in the process, old web pages aren't being broken. An important thing to realize is that no one should have ever made a page without a DOCTYPE. There is no HTML standard that doesn't require one. If one writes a page without a DOCTYPE, there's no reason the browser should do anything with it - the browser has every right to simply say "your page isn't written in a standard language, so i'm not going to display it." The fact that browsers display it at all is just to be nice. So, the long and short of it is, always use a correct DOCTYPE, and you don't have to worry about this older "quirks-mode" stuff from the 90's. Loading...
Options:	Enable Slimies Enable Linkwords

« Backwards — Onwards »

Show Forum Drop Down Menu