Forum Moderators: open
Even the BBC does not have <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> at the top of all its pages.
What actual difference do these errors make to a viewer ?
[webmasterworld.com...]
IE reads doc type and adjusts some things in the display based on the doc type.
Also, as the v7 realases get closer (and some v6 browsers) you'll notice that they pay attention to the doctype and display accordingly.
The quick answer is: Not much.
The longer answer is: As browsers become more standards compliant the type of document will affect how the browser renders the page and in some cases this may mean that your css/html will not render porperly unless you specify what kind of dtd it conforms too.
Nick
Don't know where you got the & thing from. What do you mean?
Nick
If you do not this would come up as an error during validation.
What I am asking is how far and important is all this validation. Above someone mentions the v7 browsers that will require more valid html.
This goes beyond my understanding as from what I see the browsers are becoming more lenient and allowing for more errors of the basic type.
But lets say they are becoming more "validated code" orientated then what happens to all those billions of pages out there that are not being updated.
Or just take any big website that has thousands of pages, is the author supposed to go back and revalidate all his pages to make them valid.
Like I mentioned above I did not even know that <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> was needed just to validate a page. What am I supposed to do return to all my old pages which still contain valid info and update every one ? There are thousands and this is why I do not follow the validation discussion.
Nick
This is really my concern, the older pages. New pages we create every day are created to validate but the old ones ?
As for NS 4 we disregard it completely, a mistake perhaps but a decision made non the less.
Nick
If you have a site that runs into the hundreds or thousands of pages, you have to find a way to make this task easier -- i.e. use templates of one sort or another. As CSS continues to develop, it will in future become easier to separate design from content, and this is a text-book example of why this separation is necessary. Together with includes (SSI, PHP or whatever) and whatever tools you care to invest in that allow you to do things like global search-and-replace, you need to design a site of that size in a way that it can be easily maintained and updated.
So yes, you should make those changes wisely, and now, before you get to the 10,000 stage and suddenly all those deprecated tags cease to be supported at all.
I think templates are just the coolest thing. You create a header, footer, navigaiton in seperate files and then just use them on every page. Then you only need worry about the actuall content you put in them in terms of updating.
Anything else can be changed global across thousands of pages in the time it takes to edit one page ;)
Curreintly I use PHPLib but will be moving to Smarty with the next big project...
Nick
Isn't there a way to use a "search + replace" utility to do all this very quickly?
For example, you'd tell it to search every page in a folder for:
<html>
<head>
And replace it with:
<!doctype HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
If this would work as easily as I describe (admittedly I've never tried this), then it would be considerably less time consuming, and could possibly make a difference in how the pages are rendered. It is my understanding that there are "search + replace" freeware utilities available for such a project - might be worth checking out...
