Paul,
To switch to standards compliant mode, you must have a full and complete
doctype but it does NOT have to be XHTML at all.
Hope could just have easily changed from an incomplete HTML4.01 Transitional
doctype to a complete version. This is not a criticism of Hope, as she may
have had other reasons for moving to XHML.
For example this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
Could be changed to this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd";>
And this would trigger standards compliant mode. The same is true for
HTML4.01 Strict and other doctypes. The key here is using the full doctype
including the url.
Keep in mind that some people choose to use incomplete doctypes deliberately
so that they can deal will IE5 and IE6 in the same way. This is fine as long
as you are aware about the implications and can deal with them. As you can
see, font-size inheritance into tables is one of these implications.
For the full range of correct doctypes, go here:
http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html
Other doctype reading:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype
http://gutfeldt.ch/matthias/articles/doctypeswitch.html
http://www.w3.org/International/articles/serving-xhtml/Overview.html#quirks
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html
http://www.webstandards.org/learn/reference/prolog_problems.html
http://www.tantek.com/XHTML/Test/minimal.html
HTH
Russ
> Yes I had no idea that doctype could effect CSS rendering like this. I was
> always scraed to use XHTML 1.0 strict but the combination below looks good.
> It will become my new standard.
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