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DTD - is it necessary?

Posted by fionam

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fionam

DTD - is it necessary?
October 25, 2011 08:11AM

Registered: 12 years ago
Posts: 38
Rating: 0

Just curious. I've noticed on my travels through PHP examples on the web that some developers use the HTML/XHTML DTD in their pages that contain HTML and others don't. Is it strictly necessary?

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PeterJ

Re: DTD - is it necessary?
October 25, 2011 06:48PM

Registered: 12 years ago
Posts: 67
Rating: 0

Quote
From the W3C Tips for Webmasters: Why specify a DOCTYPE? Because it defines which version of (X)HTML your document is actually using, and this is a critical piece of information needed by browsers or other tools processing the document. Since the document type is needed by web browsers, viewers and other HTML parsing tools in order to properly interpret a document as a particular version of HTML, the information provided by the <!DOCTYPE html> tag is especially significant in situations where there are no HTTP headers available or when the headers do not indicate an xHTML/XML media type such as application/xhtml+xml. Therefore, the DOCTYPE declaration is an important element in HTML documents, especially when creating polyglot HTML documents.

Ive never had problems not delaring it but you should yes

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fionam

Re: DTD - is it necessary?
October 26, 2011 01:33PM

Registered: 12 years ago
Posts: 38
Rating: 0

Thanks, Peter, that's what I thought but doubts started entering my mind when I saw a number of examples that didn't use it ....