Re: Doctype detection

On Thursday, July 27, 2000 at 10:55 AM, roconnor@uwaterloo.ca (Russell Steven Shawn O'Connor) wrote:

> I agree with most of what Christian Smith had to say, but,
> 
> On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, Christian Smith wrote:
> 
> > Not at all. If there is no DOCTYPE the browser is not obliged to do any
> > such thing since there is not any support for CSS in HTML 2.0.
> 
> Suppose an HTML 2.0 document cotains a <LINK> to an external valid style
> sheet. Do you think a HTML 4.0 CSS complient browser is required to use
> that style sheet?  I'm not sure what the answer is.

The problem with this question is that there is no such thing as "HTML 4.0 CSS compliancy". There is

HTML 2.0 compliancy and
HTML 4.0 compliancy and
CSS 1 compliancy and 
CSS 2 compliancy
(and other)

A browser can be all of the above at once.

Now, a document may be HTML 2.0 compliant AND have a LINK which reference a
CSS1 or CSS2 style sheet in a valid fashion.

So, given an document without a DOCTYPE, said document having a valid LINK
to an external style sheet, if the document validates as HTML 2.0, it would
be reasonable to expect a browser (which claims HTML 2.0 compliancy and CSS
1/2 compliancy) to download and make use of the style sheet in rendering the
document (assuming of course that the user has allowed style sheet support).

If the browser did not do this that would effectively invalidate a claim of
CSS1/2 compliancy, no? It would however have no impact on HTML 2.0, 3.2 or
4.0 compliancy.

-- 
Christian Smith  |  csmith@barebones.com  |  http://web.barebones.com

He who dies with the most friends... Is still dead!

Received on Thursday, 27 July 2000 12:20:00 UTC