Re: DOCTYPE affects Netscape 6

On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, J. David Bryan wrote:

> On 19 Dec 2001, at 10:30, Carole Mah wrote:
>
> > I have a number of completely w3c-compliant documents.  I ran them through
> > Tidy to be sure.
>
> I don't use Netscape 6 or X-anything-L, so I cannot comment on the bulk of
> your post, but note that HTML Tidy is not a validator, so Tidying files
> does not then imply that they are "W3C-compliant."  See:

Of course it does not imply validation (duh! I validated with our
local validator [ http://www.stg.brown.edu/cgi-bin/xmlvalid/] ), but it
does imply well-formedness.

I don't think there are many rendering engines that expect valid
documents since the vast majority of HTML documents are not valid
(although the iCab browser will give you a frowny face if the
document is invalid, while still trying to render it as best it can).

But this is beside the point.

The point is that Netscape 6's rendering engine does not behave in a way
that makes sense to me.

When giving a browser a well-formed document, with no special attributes
or styles for the tables, one would expect no strange rendering of the
table cells.  Yet this is what happens to my documents when the DOCTYPE is
in place.

Mind you, having worked with SGML for a long time, I find the idea of
stripping off the DOCTYPE to be rather abhorent, but since well-formedness
rather than validation is often sufficient, perhaps I should not be
disappointed.

-c

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Carole E. Mah                     carolem@stg.brown.edu
           Senior Programmer/Analyst
   Brown University Scholarly Technology Group
               phn 401-863-2669
               fax 401-863-9313
            http://www.stg.brown.edu/
  personal: http://www.stg.brown.edu/~carolem/

Received on Wednesday, 19 December 2001 12:25:33 UTC