DAVOUD TOHIDY wrote: > Now from here I would like to point out an important issue. There has > been some people on the internet claiming that Doctype is only for > "VALIDATION" purposes. I believe they are just joking and that they > do not see the big picture.
The "big picture" is that browsers misuse doctype as a switch-trigger for (what one might call) adjustments to their engines, so they can handle several generations of non-standard and standard based documents without "breaking the web". Layout and script handling are altered. The doctype itself _is_ nothing but a declaration of which (X)HTML standard a document's source-code is based on, so one can check conformance - validity if you like. CSS standards - which most visual rendering is based on today - deviated on several points from the default and attribute-based rendering earlier (quirks mode) rendering engines was based on, so the need for a "branching mechanism" appeared. Once that "branching mechanism" was introduced there was no going back, and we had the "doctype-triggered mode switch". Now we have several modes, and one particular browser needs more modes and is running out of doctypes to switch on and want to introduce new triggers, while the others seem to have kept their path cleaner and can continue building on existing rendering modes. This only to say that the role of doctype is what each browser make of it, so if you want to build up a 'rendering comparison table' you'll have to study the major browser and their respective mode-branches in quite some detail, and must probably go beyond the misused and abused doctype pretty soon. You can start here... <http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support> ...and add the other rendering modes on top of it. Since I rarely ever validate my (X)HTML source-code, the only purpose the doctype has at my end is to tell my fine-tuned version of HTML Tidy which (X)HTML standard it should clean up my documents against. I think that is one of the few proper uses one can make of a doctype. regards Georg -- http://www.gunlaug.no ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
