- From: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:57:54 +1100
- To: "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- CC: Helyn Davenport <helyn@pixiport.com>, www-validator@w3.org
Jukka K. Korpela wrote: > On the other hand, moving from Transitional to Strict is largely > a matter of principle, rather than something that has immediate > practical benefits. Well, actually that's not entirely true thanks to DOCTYPE sniffing (an unnecessary evil designed to allow authors to continue using the mistakes of the past, rather than forcing to them to learn and comply with the standards). See Mozilla's DOCTYPE sniffing documentation [1]. Using a transitional DOCTYPE with a system identifier (the URI), Mozilla based browsers will use "Almost Standards Mode" rather than the full "Standards Mode". The differences between the two are minor, and may or may not have any effect in this case, but still worth noting. I don't believe other browsers have almost standards mode, so they will use full standards mode instead. Using HTML 4.01 transitional without the system identifier, Mozilla (and most likely other browsers too) will trigger quirks mode, and attempt to render the document with an intentionally buggy implementation based on the old IE and NN 4.x browsers. I recommend migrating to a strict DOCTYPE in order to ensure that modern browsers will always attempt to render the document according the the standards. That may, unfortunately, vary in some browsers due to them not implementing the standards correctly, but standards mode at least ensures the browser will do its best. [1] http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/quirks/doctypes.html -- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/ http://GetFirefox.com/ Rediscover the Web http://GetThunderbird.com/ Reclaim your Inbox
Received on Sunday, 27 February 2005 13:58:03 UTC