<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>thanks for that, i went and had a look at w3.org, it's quite helpful.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Not just quite helpful, but home to the authoritative specs for most web standards!

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>why is it necessary to have
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> at the top of a page?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

It's not...

  1. <LI>Unless it's an HTML 4.01 Transitional document.<LI>If you don't care if it validates!


There are a number of versions of HTML in use, including HTML 3.2 (Final) and 4.0, 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 (Strict, Transitional or Frameset). The DTD (Document Type Declaration) identifies the version in use, and is a requirement of the specs.

See:

http://www.wdvl.com/Authoring/HTML/Validation/DTD.html

http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/ht...l/doctype.html

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/intro.html

The DTD is necessary for validation, and validation is smart because, to quote the last of these URLs:

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Many authors rely on a limited set of browsers to check on the documents they produce, assuming that if the browsers can render their documents they are valid. Unfortunately, this is a very ineffective means of verifying a document's validity precisely because browsers are designed to cope with invalid documents by rendering them as well as they can to avoid frustrating users.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Unfortunately, some browsers (especially N******* 4.7) still contrive to make a mess of valid HTML, but that's another story!

Peter</p>

Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on June 16, 2001 at 11:35.]