Re: DTD for HTML 4.01 on official W3C homepage damaged?

This is a frequently asked question.

The HTML 4 DTDs predate XML. They are not XML DTDs, but SGML DTDs, so if  
you try to use them in an XML processor it will complain.

If you want to use XML tools, you must use XML DTDs, which are the ones  
for XHTML.

<!DOCTYPE html
      PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html
      PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html
      PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN"
      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
      "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN"
       "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd">

Thanks for taking the time to comment.

Best wishes,

Steven Pemberton


On Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:40:36 +0100, Daniel Hoffmann  
<daniel.a.hoffmann@uni-wuerzburg.de> wrote:

> Dear Sir or Madam
>
> I'm a German research assistant teaching a HTML/CSS-course for
> beginners this semester at university in Wuerzburg. I wanted to show
> my students how they can validate their HTML/CSS-Code. But the
> validator http://validator.w3.org didn't recognize any errors (omitted
> html-tag, omitted start- and end-tags...). So I tried it with oxygen
> from SyncroSoft. The program told me, that there are errors within the
> DTD. It really tried to validate the document using the DTDs that are
> available online at the W3C homepage. I tried each of the following
> HTML-Declarations and oxygen always detected errors in the DTDs:
>
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
>
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
>
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
>  "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
>
> The DTDs you find opening the URLs seem to be damaged. For me it looks
>  like some Entities have a missing closing bracket ">" and some
> comments don't start with "<!--" but only with "--". You can find the
> same problems at chapter 21 of the HTML 4.01 Specification:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/sgml/dtd.html.
> Perhaps I used the wrong URLs in the DTDs or something went wrong with
> a transformation on the website?
> I only want to inform you about this and would ask you to take a look
> at the DTDs yourself to check them.
>
> I know that HTML-code is handled very leniently by all browsers and
> that it doesn't really matter, that the code is absolutely valid. So
> there is actually no need to validate HTML-code. But I think it's a
> matter of good style to keep to a given standard.
> I'm using now XHTML-transitional for my course, this works very well.
>
>
> Sincerely yours
> Daniel Hoffmann
>
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 12 November 2009 13:53:33 UTC