Comment Feed for Creating a new website, what DocType should one use? (TechOff on Channel 9)

Re: Re: Re: Creating a new website, what DocType should one use?

W3bbo — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 07:55:46 GMT

My bad. I saw a notice somewhere on the W3C's site that encouraged XHTML use for all new documents, and assumed it refered to the Strict variant.

Re: Re: Creating a new website, what DocType should one use?

blowdart — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 07:25:33 GMT

Uh-huh. And you can link to the statement that Transitional shouldn't be used as the default in an editor?

Heck the W3C site doesn't make the same claim for the DTD as you do; it says

Many people writing Web pages for the general public to access might want to use this flavor of XHTML 1.0. The idea is to take advantage of XHTML features including style sheets but nonetheless to make small adjustments to your markup for the benefit of those viewing your pages with older browsers which can't understand style sheets. These include using the body element with bgcolor, text and link attributes.

Re: Re: Creating a new website, what DocType should one use?

turrican — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 04:52:30 GMT

I see, "XHTML 1.0 Strict" shall be then. I have some rewriting to do. :)

Re: Creating a new website, what DocType should one use?

W3bbo — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:42:35 GMT

The W3C Recommends using XHTML 1.0 Strict (assuming you can keep to the spirit of a "pure" XHTML document with a CSS-based design). If you're going to use tables-for-layout and a bunch of development tactics from 1998 just stick with the HTML4.01 Loose doctype.

Don't use XHTML1.1 unless you can gurantee that the document will be served as application/xml+xhtml, but since IE doesn't support this there isn't much point to use XHTML1.1.

XHTML1.0 Transitional is literally that, a DTD for documents in-transition to the cleaner XHTML1.0 Strict. Microsoft should not have set it as the default DTD because it goes against its purpose.