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Do I need to declare XML on a page using the XHTML doctype?

Answer 1

+2 A:

I've never included it (always gone with just the doctype), and w3c says my XHTML 1.0 Strict projects are "valid."

Jonathan Sampson 2009-08-26 14:34:12

Answer 2

+3 A:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

...is the default version and encoding for XML, so you don't need it at all. If you are serving XHTML as text/html, it probably shouldn't be there at all.

However, in other places I'm seeing (including w3.org) that the DOCTYPE must be the first tag.

Sounds like some confusion... DOCTYPE isn't a tag and neither is <?xml?> (which is called the XML declaration, and looks like a Processing Instruction, but it isn't one of those, either).

If you are including both, the XML declaration must come first. The trick is that IE6's DOCTYPE sniffer only detects Standards Mode DOCTYPEs if they're the first thing on the page, which means you can't use an XML declaration and you must stick with XML 1.0 and UTF-8 encoding (which is no great loss).

bobince 2009-08-26 14:49:35

Pardon for the misapplication of the word "tag". I was quoting some documentation I was reading.

Al Everett 2009-08-26 14:55:55

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Do I need to declare XML on a page using the XHTML doctype?

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