HTML Forum

**SteveT** · 08-17-2005, 10:48 AM

Is the DOCTYPE declaration a fundamental requirement preceding your html code? My site is a MS FrontPage 2003 generated site. If yes, how should I know which DOCTYPE declaration I should use and do I use the full declaration?

I have seen sites with and with out the DOCTYPE visible and ranking very well on the search engine scene.

Thanks,

Steve T

**fancymoustache** · 08-17-2005, 11:04 AM

DOCTYPEs are not exactly required, but they do hold significant value. When you use one correctly, your webpages should act the same in all browsers. A lot of the problems that are listed here on WT is about something working in FireFox and not in IE, or something similar. Here is a good article to read about DOCTYPEs: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype/

**SteveT** · 08-17-2005, 11:54 AM

Thanks for your feedback. The site explains the reasoning well, however I am still uncertain about the following:

1. Should the code go on your .index (home?) page only, or should you add the code to all pages of your site?
2. Is it wise to modify the opening HTML code to reflect additional info such as >> example: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">?

**fancymoustache** · 08-17-2005, 12:28 PM

1) goes on every page
2) I've never used that so I don't know. The only thing I make sure to put on every page is a DOCTYPE and an encoding. I use <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> for that.

**SteveT** · 08-17-2005, 02:01 PM

Thanks FancyM - That's exactly what I have done.

**Kyrnt** · 08-17-2005, 03:42 PM

Steve, I use the following DOCTYPE declaration. fancy is right in that it is not required, but it is good practice.

Code:

<html> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C/DTD/HTML 4.0//EN">

**SteveT** · 08-17-2005, 07:28 PM

Guys, currently, below I have listed my spec. W3c is still telling me I have errors, however based on my generator (MSFP2003) maybe the errors or still ok. What do you think?

Wed Aug 17 16:36:43 2005
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.1b
Size: 13947
Content-Type: text/html
Encoding: iso-8859-1

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

What do you think?

**chrishirst** · 08-18-2005, 04:19 PM

And are we supposed to guess what the errors are.

You have posted your server headers. Nothing to do with W3c validation, and the fact you are using a transitiional DTD.

Validation is done against your HTML source code and for that we need a URL.

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