HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Compatibility
No standards support
Internet Explorer 5+
Note
• Conditional comments are often used to link special Internet Explorer-specific style
sheets or to include scripts solely for these browsers.
<!DOCTYPE> (Document Type Definition)
This SGML construct specifies the document type definition corresponding to the
document. There are no attributes or events associated with this element.
Standard Syntax
<!DOCTYPE "DTD IDENTIFIER">
Examples
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 TRANSITIONAL//EN">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www
.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "xhtml11.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html>
Compatibility
HTML 2, 3.2, 4, 4.01, 5
XHTML 1.0, 1.1, Basic
Firefox 1+, Internet Explorer 2+,
Netscape 1+, Opera 4+, Safari 1+
Notes
• The
<!DOCTYPE>
statement should be used as the first line of all documents.
• Validation programs might use this construct when determining the correctness of
an HTML document.
• While HTML5 does not follow the SGML/XML concept of validation, the
<!DOCTYPE>
is still used. HTML5 does however provide for syntax checking
currently dubbed conformance checking. Note though that conformance checking
does not rely on XML/SGML grammar.
• Modern browsers may determine what rendering mode to use depending on the
<!DOCTYPE>
statement. This is dubbed the
doctype switch
. An incorrect
<!DOCTYPE>
that does not correspond to appropriate markup usage may result in inaccurate
display.
