specifying and attribute

Question

When starting an html document I always write

<!doctype html>
<html>

But there are lots of sites writing it as

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Is there a danger in doing it the way I do ? Whats the benefit of all the extra attributes?

The lower one is for XHTML, your's is for HTML5 – Lukas Knuth Mar 15 '13 at 13:06 — Lukas Knuth, Mar 15 '13 at 13:06

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 15 '13 at 11:39

0

You're using the HTML5 doctype, see http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/ and http://alistapart.com/article/doctype/

answered Mar 15 '13 at 11:39

devdigital

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 15 '13 at 11:40

What you're setting your doctype to is HTML5. The other versions you've seen are for the lower (HTML4.01, etc) versions.

As far as I am aware, using the HTML 5 tag should cause too many problems unless people are viewing your site on older (IE6 or lower) browsers.

You can find a more comprehensive guide here: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_doctype.asp

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 15 '13 at 11:40

those sites are using before html5 version.But you are using html5 version.In html5 you can simply specify the doctype like

<!doctype html>

But in previous versions(before html5) we have doctype like

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 15 '13 at 11:40

Usually a <!DOCTYPE> declaration is used to distinguish between versions of HTMLish lanaguages (in this case, HTML or XHTML).

Different markup languages will behave differently. For example is height:100%

NOTE:(This is important): Do not mix HTML with XHTML

You'll notice that the height of the components is drastically different, and the only difference between the documents!!!!

specifying and attribute

4 Answers4