Doctype

Once upon a time Harold A. Driscoll shaped the electrons to say...
>Check out the discussion of the <!DOCTYPE...> statement in the RFC 1866 HTML
>2.0 Specifications. You'll see that it is part of every properly compliant
>HTML document. (True, you can often get your pages to work without one. But,

And I think this is silly.  *I* understand what it does, but I do networking
for a living, I'm a professsional geek.  Can anyone tell me that John Q.
Public is going to grasp doctypes and seriously start using them?  *And*
keep a straight face?

If you use an editor that sticks it on for you, fine.  But if you write
your HTML by hand?

And my read on the RFC is that you have one declaration - ie, one DOCTYPE
per page.  I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong, it wouldn't be the
first time I'd managed to miss something.

But if that is the way it works - what if I mix HTML '3.0' tags, NS tags,
and M$IE tags all in the same page?  (And I have seen this done.)  What
is the DOCTYPE statement?

Maybe I have a mental block on this, but HTML is not what I do full time,
but I'm certainly not a stranger to computing - and DOCTYPES are clear to
me.

I would be loathe to attempt to explain them to someone from Marketing.

-MZ
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Received on Tuesday, 13 February 1996 13:12:49 UTC