- From: Masayasu Ishikawa <mimasa@w3.org>
- Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2001 03:57:18 +0900
- To: www-validator@w3.org
Terje Bless <link@tss.no> wrote: > *sigh* Could those that had some sort of conclusive proof that HTML 2.0 > made the DOCTYPE optional ("should" or "may"?) please holler? AFAICT, > Liam's citation [1] specifically states, in prose, that a DOCTYPE is > required for a conforming HTMl 2.0 document. Even if it later says that > User Agents are allowed to guess in the absense of a DOCTYPE and still be a > conforming _UA_, this does not negate the requirement that a DOCTYPE be > present to actually be a conforming _document_. Right. Also note that "B.1 Notes on invalid documents" [2] of the HTML 4 Specification says, though informative, The HTML 2.0 specification ([RFC1866]) observes that many HTML 2.0 user agents assume that a document that does not begin with a document type declaration refers to the HTML 2.0 specification. As experience shows that this is a poor assumption, the current specification does not recommend this behavior. so it is no longer a recommended user agent behaviour. This part hasn't been changed since the first release of the HTML 4.0 Specification [3], back to December 1997. People should also aware that RFC 1866 has been obsoleted by RFC 2854 [4], and its current status is "HISTORIC" [5]. It is no longer a Standards Track document. > [1] - <URL:http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_3.html#SEC3.3> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.1 [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40-971218/appendix/notes.html#h-B.1 [4] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2854.txt [5] http://www.ietf.org/iesg/1rfc_index.txt Regards, -- Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org W3C - World Wide Web Consortium
Received on Friday, 9 March 2001 13:55:47 UTC