- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Sat, 15 May 2004 18:43:44 +0300 (EEST)
- To: www-validator@w3.org
On Sat, 15 May 2004, Christopher Bergström wrote:
> The checked page did not contain a document type ("DOCTYPE")
> declaration.
That implies that validation cannot be performed, since validation by
definition means checking a document against a document type definition.
Is there any need to say anything more? Anything else is probably either
misleading or simply not true.
> This declaration is required by all browsers to help
> interpret and define how your page will appear.
No, it is not, and to the extent that browsers do such things, they
misbehave.
> The DOCTYPE declaration
> is the foundation for how your page will render
No, not at all.
> and is highly
> recommended that you insert the proper DOCTYPE declaration.
It is required for validation, so it's misleading to say "recommended".
> If a
> browser can not find a proper DOCTYPE then it is forced to guess the
> best candidate
No it is not, and browsers don't do any such guesses. They just use
whatever a browser programmer decided.
> and can sometimes cause rendering differences between
> different browsers.
Actually, quite often, but this is irrelevant in validation.
> Ensuring your pages contain a proper DOCTYPE and
> valid HTML/XHTML will reduce the time it takes to maintain the same
> appearance across most browsers.
Hardly, but most importantly, the idea of the same appearance is
misguided.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Saturday, 15 May 2004 11:45:09 UTC