Re: [Fwd: "DOCTYPE declaration" - What is the advantage of a this?]

Hi folks,

I'm sorry I didn't provide any context for this message that
was received on site-comments. The question is: what are the
advantages of a DOCTYPE declaration. I thought someone on www-validator
would be able to provide a complete answer. Is this a FAQ question
somewhere?

Thanks for any input.

 - Ian


"Ian B. Jacobs" wrote:
> 
> "Markus Meister, FinanzNachrichten.de" wrote:
> >
> > Dear Sirs
> >
> > Unfortunately I got no answer to my question until now. So I would like to ask again:
> >
> > Currently our programmers work on the relaunch of our website. Today I have checked the current website in your validator and found
> > out, that we don't use such a declaration. I wondered a bit and had a look to google.com, yahoo.com and amazon.com. These 3 websites
> > also don't have such what.
> >
> > So my question would be: What is the advantage of such a DOCTYPE declaration? If there is an advantage, why do the biggest websites
> > in the world not use such a declaration?
> > Resp. what is the disadvantage, if we do not use a DOCTYPE declaration?
> >
> > I am looking forward to some answers. Thank your in advance.
> > Here the result of the test of http://www.finanznachrichten.de/nachrichten :
> >
> > Below are the results of attempting to parse this document with an SGML parser.
> >
> > Fatal Error: no document type declaration; will parse without validation
> >
> > I could not parse this document, because it uses a public identifier that is not in my catalog.
> >
> > You should make the first line of your HTML document a DOCTYPE declaration, for example, for a typical HTML 4.01 document:
> >
> >       <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
> >       <HTML>
> >         <HEAD>
> >           <TITLE>Title</TITLE>
> >         </HEAD>
> >
> >         <BODY>
> >           <-- ... body of document ... -->
> >         </BODY>
> >       </HTML>
> >
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Sorry, I can't validate this document.
> >
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Source Listing
> > Below is the source input I used for this validation:
> >
> >    1:
> >    2: <html><head><title>FinanzNachrichten.de - Alle News zu Aktien, Börse und Wirtschaft!!</title>
> >    3: <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
> >    4: <META NAME="Author" CONTENT="FinanzNachrichen.de - Alle News zu Aktien, Börse und Wirtschaft!!">
> >    5: <META NAME="Publisher" CONTENT=" FinanzNachrichen.de - Alle News zu Aktien, Börse und Wirtschaft!!">
> >    6: <META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="30 days">
> >    7: <META NAME="keywords"
> > content="Finanznachrichten,Finanz-Nachrichten,Zocker,Aktie,Aktien,Analyse,Aktienkurse,Aktienfonds,Anleihen,Börse,Charts,DAX,DOW,Fina
> > nzen,Forum,Musterdepot,Nachrichten,NEMAX,Neuer Markt,News,Newsletter,NASDAQ,Online,Realtime,Realtimekurse,Wallstreet,Wirtschaft">
> >    8: <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="FinanzNachrichten.de bietet Ihnen die wichtigsten News für den Bereich Aktien, Börse und
> > Wirtschaft mit täglich rund 1.500 Wirtschaftsmeldungen!">
> >    9: <META NAME="robots" content="index, follow">
> >   10: <link rel="StyleSheet" href="../fnt.css" type="text/css">
> >   11: <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.finanznachrichten.de/favicon.ico">
> >   12: </head>
> >
> > Best regards
> >
> > FINANZNACHRICHTEN.DE
> > Markus Meister
> >
> > -------------------------------------------
> > http://www.FinanzNachrichten.de
> > Alle News zu Aktien, Börse und Wirtschaft!!
> > -------------------------------------------
> 
> --
> Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
> Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447

-- 
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447

Received on Monday, 3 December 2001 09:20:22 UTC