Afternoon Shelly You wrote
> Here's a question that was brought to my attention today... > > What, exactly, does the Doctype *do*? I know it determines how the > browser > should treat the display of the page and stuff...but what would happen if > you used perfect CSS that's on par with today's standards, but served your > website as HTML 4.01 Transitional? How out of whack would it throw your > CSS? Are there things that HTML 4.01 doesn't even recognize, because it's > not that far ahead in the game? If so, what? Would upping it one notch > by > adding the URI (or changing to HTML 4.01 Strict) make it function > properly, > or would you need to change completely to XHTML 1.0 Transitional at the > very > least? > > I was just curious...it was just an interesting thing that passed my way > today, and I understand the need for the right Doctypes, but I couldn't > find > anything that *exactly* told me how to tell which doctype is best suited > for > whatever you're designing/recognizes (or doesn't) certain parts of CSS. > > Hope I made sense here! > > ~Shelly > One if the best explanations and list of resources can be found a Matthias Gutfeldt's page on this subject. [1] If your document is in "Standard" mode browsers will use the modern Box model. In "Quirks" mode browsers will render the mark up using the old IE 5x box model. With Internet Explorer 6 or later, when you use the !DOCTYPE declaration to switch on standards-compliant mode, the width and height properties specify the distance between the left and right edges and top and bottom edges of the bounding box, respectively. The border and padding belts are not included. (from the MS library [2] ) When the !DOCTYPE declaration does not switch on standards-compliant mode, as with earlier versions of Internet Explorer, the width property includes the object's content box, plus the values of the following properties: border-left, border-right, padding-left, and padding-right. Subtracting the sum of the values of these properties from the value of the width property equals the width of the parent object's content box. Likewise, subtracting the sum of the values of the border-top, border-bottom, padding-top, and padding-bottom properties from the value of the height property equals the height of the parent object's content box. (from the MS library [2] ) There is also good infomation in the CSS-D Wiki [3] See "Switching: Hope this helps a little. [1] http://gutfeldt.ch/matthias/articles/doctypeswitch.html [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnie60/html/cssenhancements.asp [3] http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Jim Nannery www.redfernenterprises.com ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
