What Doc Type to use

Forum Moderators: mack

Message Too Old, No Replies

What Doc Type to use

I have no Idea what Doc Type to list?

HappyMomAnna

4:14 pm on Oct 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

I do not know where my Doc Type at the top of my pages went?

I understand that I need this in order to please search engines however I do not know What Doc Type to put on the Top of my pages or exactly how to write the entry!

Can anyone help me with this?

Thank you,

encyclo

4:21 pm on Oct 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

If you are not sure, try this one:

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

It goes on the very first line of the document with nothing before it - place it before the

<html>

tag. :)

HappyMomAnna

4:24 pm on Oct 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

Thank You so much.... I believe this looks like something that was there before I played around too much with my HEAD tags...Not sure what I did!

Thanks,

HappyMomAnna

4:47 pm on Oct 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

one more Question:

You say to 'TRY' that one--will I know if it is the right one?

Thanks

mack

8:33 pm on Oct 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

4.01 Transitional is by far th emost forgiving right now. What you can do is test it on an html validation service. If the validator accepts it then you have chose the correct doc type.

If you have problems you should receive a suggestion from the validator.

Transitional is a lot more flexible than strict, so you will get away with a little bit more.

Mack.

HappyMomAnna

4:14 pm on Oct 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

Thank you I had not thought about a valadation service I think I have been using one so....I will test!

Thank you again for all the help here!

Anna

JAB Creations

6:50 am on Oct 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

A more advanced reply to make you aware of the range of options available to you...

Most versions of (x)html have transitional and strict versions of their code and thus strict is harder to validate your code.

You can use many validators to ensure you are properly creating code, an example is the W3C's validator which can be found here...
[validator.w3.org...]

After HTML is XHTML which is not that different though HTML 4.01 transitional should serve most people just fine.