CSS and Standards-Compliance mode in IE6

Tantek:
I am assuming you would be the best person to answer this question, yet 
I am posing it to all. Is this statement from a SitePoint article 
accurate. If so should all of the sites I am developing and have 
developed with XHTML have the XMl declaration removed?
What are the ramifications of removing the declaration pending the 
possible use of a future XML workflow?

> IE6 decides whether to use Standards-Compliant mode based on the 
> DOCTYPE of the page. Unfortunately, this detection mechanism runs into 
> problems with XHTML documents.
>
> The standards (not to mention the default templates in programs like 
> Dreamweaver MX) tell us that a typical XHTML document should look like 
> this:
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
> "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
> <head>
> <title>Document Title</title>
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
>   content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
> </head>
> <body>
> </body>
> </html>
>
> Unfortunately, the <?xml ... ?> declaration at the top of the page 
> prevents IE6 from seeing the !DOCTYPE, and that browser will disable 
> Standards-Compliant mode on pages that were obviously written with Web 
> standards very much in mind.
>
> Fortunately, the XML standards allow for the <?xml ... ?> declaration 
> to be left out if you're happy with the default values. Leaving it out 
> lets IE6 find the !DOCTYPE and run in Standards-Compliant mode.

Thank You
Jim Siburt
"Logical Dreams Studio"
New media Design
www.logicaldreams.org
www.out-shine.com
Cell 717-330-5038
Office 717-285-1380

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Received on Saturday, 22 February 2003 14:47:30 UTC