Re: DOCTYPE affects Netscape 6

Mozilla (and I guess also Netscape 6.x) has a "quirks" mode in which it 
attempts to emulate other browser behaviour (particularly Netscape 4.x), 
and a "standards" mode in which it attempts to follow the standards. I 
tripped over something odd to do with colours which worked in quirks 
mode, but not standards mode, as I had not used the standard syntax (I 
think I missed the # from the hex colour attribute). I discovered that 
standards mode is enabled with a doctype declaration, and quirks mode 
without one.

Cheers,
  Scott

Carole Mah wrote:

>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject:
>
> Re: DOCTYPE affects Netscape 6
> From:
>
> Carole Mah <carole@fates.org>
> Date:
>
> Wed, 19 Dec 2001 12:25:32 -0500 (EST)
> To:
>
> "J. David Bryan" <jdbryan@acm.org>
>
> To:
>
> "J. David Bryan" <jdbryan@acm.org>
> CC:
>
> HTML Tidy List <html-tidy@w3.org>
>
>
>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 20:07:31 UTC