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@PeterPan_321Jan 08.2014 — #So its safe from here on in to just say <!DOCTYPE html>? I did notice that everything worked fine with that too, I was just afraid someone's older browser might get confused.
Yeah that was an eye opener to me too! "Call Home"!! That's funny! But I'm surprised! If anything I'd always found IE way more tollerant of "malformed" code then some other browsers I like better. Well live and learn i guess! Thanks! :-) @PeterPan_321Jan 08.2014 — #I know I tend to overthink backward compatibility. Now certainly for a new site, sure I'll just say <!DOCTYPE html> and be done with it. The glaring worry that comes to mind is this... I have some much older websites that have become pretty popular, and some time ago I started adding my own music compositions, as well as my Videos, by jumping on the FLASH bandwagon. Well now that so many people are browsing on Androids and I-phones, all those features don't work. So I was educating myself about HTML 5, and video and audio conversions, so eventually I could upgrade all my pages that formerly just used FLASH. But if I have to change my <!DOCTYPE> tag to enable HTML5, what will that do to older visitors?
I know the prevailing wisdom is to just ignore users with browsers 4 or more years old. But I'd rather support back as far as I can. Maybe I have to duplicate these pages, one for HTML 4, and another for HTML5?
Surprising importance of DOCTYPE! What happened here?
I knew the DOCTYPE tag was there to tell the browser something about the rule sets it should use to process the HTML. But I never realized how much it could muck things up, and I wonder if someone can explain what happened here.
I was on a few cool sites that lets you generate free navigation menus, some with javascript and some with CSS. One that was done 100% in CSS was on a site called “purecssmenu.com”, and I really liked it. So I plugged in some menu data and let it generate some code for me, in a samle HTML file.
Well I have a pretty dated editor, Homesite 5.5 I think, and I used it to try my new menu, creating a default HTML document, then putting all the CSS style stuff in the <head> tag and the html stuff where I wanted the menu in my page.
Well it worked fine in Firefox, but in IE 8 or IE 9, the dropdown menus would not work. then i noticed that the sample HTML code created for me by the site had a DOCTYPE like this…
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “
When I put that into my rest page, everything worked perfectly in IE. But now, compare that to the default DOCTYPE generated by my Homesite…
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”>
So the only difference is that the one that works actually contains a link to w3c.org. Well like I said, I never paid a huge amount of attention to the DOCTYPE tag, but now that i see the wrong one will break my navigation functionality if I don’t get it right, I’m concerned! What if there’s some kind of netsplit and a visitor gets to my page, but w3.org can’t be reached? And what if I start using HTML 5 for the the new <video> or <audio> tags? Will changing the DOCTYPE to reference HTML 5 start causing problems too?
I guess I need to understand and pay more attention to this TAG!
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@PeterPan_321Jan 08.2014 — #Yeah that was an eye opener to me too! "Call Home"!! That's funny! But I'm surprised! If anything I'd always found IE way more tollerant of "malformed" code then some other browsers I like better. Well live and learn i guess! Thanks! :-)
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@PeterPan_321Jan 08.2014 — #I know the prevailing wisdom is to just ignore users with browsers 4 or more years old. But I'd rather support back as far as I can. Maybe I have to duplicate these pages, one for HTML 4, and another for HTML5?