Validation and DOCTYPE

Perusing your '10 things' lists, I noticed a few problems lurking beneath otherwise good-looking HTML. Many of these could be identified and avoided by using validation - either submitting your uploaded page to the W3C Markup Validation Service or by installing the HTML Tidy firefox extension and running this in your browser. A practice I heartily recommend to you, and expect you'll take up from now on.

If you do run a validator on your pages, one of the first things you'll find is that it insists on finding a DOCTYPE.

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. Without it, many browsers will render the page in 'Quirks mode' - usually the stupidest option, where the browser assumes you’ve written old-fashioned, invalid markup as per the late 1990s - so it's important to get this right. Here's the W3C list of recommended DOCTYPES

Now things get interesting. To start, we need to decide what sort of (X)HTML we want to use. As a legacy of the browser wars there's a swag of HTML versions to choose from (including a couple that are still being developed), but for my money, you'd be mad not to go for a version of XHTML. It may be more work to get a valid page, but in the long run you'll save on re-development time and effort. Perhaps a read through HTML Versus XHTML will help you decide (although you're going to need some more research before you settle on a particular version).

So what will you be using for your pages? Have look through the links above and search for some more material on the web. Then try adding some DOCTYPEs and validating a few of your pages - and share the pain in a blog entry. In your entry I'll be looking for links to the resources you've read through; a definitive statement about your preferred markup version and type (strict or transitional), and a short sentence on why you feel this is the best one for you and your visitors.