Beta: Fatal Error: No DOCTYPE specified!

Hi,

<http://validator.w3.org:8001/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com>:

  Fatal Error: No DOCTYPE specified!
  
     I could not parse this document, because it does not include a
     DOCTYPE Declaration. A DOCTYPE Declaration is mandatory for most
     current markup languages and without such a declaration it is
     impossible to validate this document.
  
     You should make the first line of your HTML document a DOCTYPE
     declaration, for example, for a typical [29]XHTML 1.0 document:

        <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
          "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
        <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
          <head>
            <title>Title</title>
          </head>
  
       [29] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
  
          <body>
            <-- ... body of document ... -->
          </body>
        </html>
  
  
     For a list of possible DOCTYPE Declarations, please see the W3C QA
     Activity's [30]List List of Valid Doctypes.
  
       [30] http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html

1) I don't see any good reason to refuse validation completly. It's very
   simple to choose document types to default to, e.g.

     if element html has attribute xmlns
       default to XHTML 1.0 Transitional
     else
       default to HTML 4.01 Transitional

2) the page should display the revalidate form

3) It's "document type declaration", not "DOCTYPE declaration", please
   keep the terminology straight

4) The phrase talks about a "first line", while the document type
   declaration in the example takes two lines

5) The example should (as per XHTML 1.0) include a XML declaration

6) The example should (as per XHTML 1.0) use both, the lang and the
   xml:lang attribute

7) A "List List"? :-)

Received on Wednesday, 23 October 2002 07:42:38 UTC