Do I REALLY need a DOCTYPES, on my websites?

I am trying to find some updated information about DOCTYPES. It seems everything I find is about 2-3 years old.

Do I really need to use a doctype? It seems people are pushing this so the websites can be validated, however I want to know if it is mandatory to have for today's Internet world or for the future?

The reason why I ask is because I have designed over 35 websites and all of them are live on the Internet with no doctypes, They seem to look great on all browsers, (IE, Netscape, Firefox, Mozilla) and I have never received a complaint about a site not working.

It seems that people are pushing doctypes because browsers are becoming stricter with the HTML language. My quess, because I cannot find any updated information on doctypes that this has already happened. And since my websites look good on all browsers, should I need to worry.

Thanks
Chad

Without a DTD and valid code, your websites will always throw browsers into quirks mode. A browser has to use a fair amount of self-determination to render in Quirks mode, especially if your page code is particulary terrible. The browsers assume you've coded with invalid mark-up and poor structure and do their best to make the site look OK and work.

Quirks mode harks back to the ugly days of the '90's where absolutely shameful coding was commonplace. The net result of no doctype, invalid code, and quirks mode rendering includes:

• The website that will probably look different in several browsers
• The website will not conform to any standards and would therefore require much stuffing about to get it looking and functioning properly cross-browser come update time
• Your websites will create accessibility issues for users who require comforming standards from a site to readily access the content with their specialised browsers
• Your websites may work now, but as browser developers release further versions, which are incorporating standards more each time, it's likely your sites will break in the future
• Search engines do NOT like invalid code, this can influence your SERPs and standings with search spiders
• XML and RSS additions to invalidly coded pages can cause compaitibility issues. Your sites may require recoding in the future if the owners want to incorporate some of these technologies that require valid code and DTDs

... and no doubt there are several other reasons that I cant think of right now.

Perhaps another member may want to tacle the topic of advantages of habitually using correct DTD's and valid code?

I currently us FrontPage for designing websites. I also only design information websites such as landscaping business, construction companies etc.

Website that pretty much just give information about the business, (Home page, about page, services, gallery etc.) I am not creating any kind of database driven websites, just basic informational websites.

I also found out the Front Page does not use doctypes because:. "As with most modern Web development tools, FrontPage may use design-time proprietary code and attributes for HTML tags that does not validate according to the standards of the W3C"

If this is the case, am I, OK with creating standard Table layout websites with no doctype.

Is this going to become a problem in the future, or as long as my websites are working correctly on all browsers today, I should not have a problem for the future.

Thanks
Chad

metho raises pretty much all of the reasons why you want to add doc types to your website pages. I would just add that if you do not have doc types in your pages they will not validate as true HTML or XHTML documents and do raise accesibility issues for some screen readers, and other devices like cell phones and palm pilots.

I would reccomend that you use doc types in all of your pages for the reasons laid out by metho and myself above.

By the way, Dreamweaver always puts the document types in its pages and will display doc types for different kinds of dynamic pages as well such as .NET or Java so you don't have to type them yourself when you open up a new document. You might consider picking up a copy...

Kaiman

Storm King Design

I did what everyone said, and I added a Doctype to one of my pages to see what happens,

Doctype:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN""http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

However when I upload the new page and looked at it on different browsers, the layout was distorted, (Margins, table etc.)

What happened? If I use a doctype it messes up the websites, If I don't use a doctype it looks great on all browsers.

Also how do I know what doctype to use, I create websites in Front Page and it handles all of the HTML coding.

Thanks
Chad

What happened? If I use a doctype it messes up the websites, If I don't use a doctype it looks great on all browsers.

What happens is you switched your browser out of 'quirks mode' and into 'compliant mode'. It will render the code how it's supposed to look like, not what it thinks you meant it to look like.

It may look OK in all browsers now, but future browsers (and some existing ones, phones, PDAs etc) won't render it correctly or probably won't be able to read it at all. It's your choice if you leave it out for now, or re-design your site to make it look right in complient mode. Just remember you might really kick yourself later if you don't!

Also learning how to design in compliant mode now will make things easier on you as web standards become more and more prevalent and designers are required to design using accessibility standards.

Kaiman

Storm King Design

As for frontpage not inserting doc types, you can change this by coding the doctype in your default "new page", in fact you can have any code you want in the default "new page".

Since 90% of the time you are going to use the same doc type you could just put that one in your default "new page".