Re: Macromedia DreamWeaver 4 Evaluation

Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org> wrote:

> In order to produce valid HTML 4 Dreamweaver needs to have the "add Doctype"
> extension - without a doctype declared the only HTML spec that can be validly
> met is HTML 2.

That's common misunderstanding.  HTML 2.0 specification [1] does
require conforming documents to start with a DOCTYPE declaration.
Here's an excerpt:

  3.3. HTML Public Text Identifiers

     To identify information as an HTML document conforming to this
     specification, each document must start with one of the following
     document type declarations.
  
     <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
  
     This document type declaration refers to the HTML DTD in 9.1, "HTML
     DTD".
  
        NOTE - If the body of a `text/html' message entity does not begin
        with a document type declaration, an HTML user agent should infer
        the above document type declaration.

The above note is for _user agents_, not for _documents_.  Besides,
this behavior is no longer recommended.  See [2] for details.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2001JanMar/0227

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Friday, 18 May 2001 13:51:29 UTC