RE: Alt attribute for unimportant images

> From:	Jan Roland Eriksson [SMTP:jrexon@newsguy.com]
> 
> A '<!DOCTYPE...' declaration is a reference to such an external 'DTD'
> that you use at the top of your marked up page to indicate where to find
> the syntax definition (i.e. the DTD) for your markup.
	[DJW:]  
	It can contain the declaration itself, although HTML
	doesn't permit this.

> Which is using a <!DOCTYPE... declaration for a purpose it was never
> designed to handle. That use of <!DOCTYPE... is wrong and I have made
> that view of mine very clear on several occasions.
	[DJW:]  
	As the DTD cannot provide any semantics information
	other than by the user agent matching the public (or
	system identifier) againts a set of semantics rules, 
	it seems to me that it is a perfectly reasonable use of
	<!DOCTYPE to tell the user agent what semantics to apply
	to the data (or confirm that it is an unknown type).

	HTML does not need to have an <html> tag++ and documents whose
	first tag is <html> are not constrained to purport to be
	HTML as commonly understood.  The document type indentifier is
	needed to confirm for the second case, although the first case
	could be handled by parsing the DTD.

	++ the HTML element has 0 0 status.

Received on Wednesday, 12 July 2000 13:44:41 UTC