missing DOCTYPE from Anton Ertl on 2000-03-03 (www-validator@w3.org from March 2000)

From: Anton Ertl <anton@a0.complang.tuwien.ac.at>
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2000 05:23:53 -0500 (EST)
To: www-validator@w3.org
Message-Id: <200003031023.LAA32622@a0.complang.tuwien.ac.at>

The validator apparently tries to validate documents without DOCTYPE
as HTML 4.0 transitional, and then complains about the missing
DOCTYPE.

Now, in HTML 2.0 the DOCTYPE is optional, according to RFC1866:

|   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.

So wouldn't it be better to have the validator start trying to deal
with a HTML-2.0 document, and only switch to something different upon
a DOCTYPE declaration?

- anton

Received on Friday, 3 March 2000 11:54:33 UTC