On 05.03.2004 00:15, Tony Edwards wrote:
This morning I was reading the mailing list and I noticed that Brent Johnson had noticed a change in the doctype output by 2.1.4.
Inspired, I commented out the
<doctype-public>-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN</doctype-public>
<doctype-system>http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd</doctype-system>
lines for the html serializer and everything worked as normal!!!
My question is, what are the implcations of doing this? Is it going to adversely affect my HTML output?
We are aware of this bug: http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24900. But until now nobody tried to find out the real reason for it. Is it a problem with the JS lib in use or a problem of Mozilla ...
The problem is that, without a proper DOCTYPE, most browsers fall into the so-called "quirks" mode, which is needed for supporting web pages that were written when de de-facto standard was whatever was provided by either NS 4 or pre-5.5 IE. Since most of those pages don't have a DOCTYPE declaration, this seemed like a good compromise.
If you include a DOCTYPE declaration instead, both Mozilla and IE will be standard-compliant (or at least they will try harder).
Now, some of the DHTML and CSS code used by Cocoon Forms (formerly known as "Woody") undoubtedly tries to adapt itself to the "quirks" mode in order to be compatible with some older browser (and this is a mistake, IMHO) and, as a consequence, it doesn't behave correctly when the browser is in "standards-compliant" mode.
Surely there are alternative implementations, but some of the best of them are license-incompatible with the ASL. For instance, I'm using a DHTML calendar widget that is better than the one we have, but unfortunately it's LGPL.
I'm afraid our only options are to either find some compatible replacements, fix what we have or rewrite it from scratch. I'm not volunteering to write any DHTML code, since I'm very ignorant about it all.
As far as my applications are concerned, I disabled the DOCTYPE just like you did, and I'm living with it, not exactly happily however.
Also be careful not to use the xhtml namespace in your output, otherwise Mozilla will still try to be standards-compliant.
Ugo
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