Re: Doctype and Netscape 6

On Tuesday, May 22, 2001, at 07:45 , Tomislav Grabic wrote:

> I had a template validated by the service. The only warning was the 
> absence of a Doctype decleration. In IE and Netscape 4.08 (except a 
> little glitch) and NN 6 it looked good before, but then I pasted in 
> each of the three listed Doctypes. NN6 was completely ripped apart. I 
> don't understand why, but maybe somebody here understands why. The url;
> http://www.iroke.de/templatetest.html

See these results: 
<http://www.google.com/search?q=doctype+sniffing+quirks+sivonen&hl=en&lr=&safe=
off&sa=G&scoring=d>

While syntactically valid, your document is formatted according to a set 
of notions (tables for layout, spacer GIFs, BR runs, etc.)  that is 
difficult or impossible to accommodate within the framework of W3C 
recommendations since 1996 at least. MacIE5, Netscape 6 (Mozilla), and 
WinIE6 take certain DOCTYPE declarations as a clue about the 
expectations of the author, and change their behaviors accordingly. 
DOCTYPEs referring to recent W3C-issued DTDs put these browsers into 
rendering modes that reward a more thorough embrace of CSS for document 
formatting. Have a look at, e.g., <http://glish.com/css/> for some 
pointers on escaping legacy formatting models.

--
todd fahrner