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views:

340

answers:

1
Q: 

Selecting a DOCTYPE for HTML 5 + all browsers

Hi. I'm using some HTML5 features on a web page and wondered what the best DOCTYPE is. Currently, this is the DOCTYPE and XMLNS:

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

Should I use the new HTML 5 DOCTYPE?

<!DOCTYPE html>

Will older browsers (IE7, FF 2.x) recognize and render the page correctly? What's the best practice in this situation? Thanks.

+2  A: 

Yes, older browsers will work fine. The reason "<!DOCTYPE html>" was chosen in HTML 5 is because it is the smallest a doctype can be and yet still trigger standards compliance mode on those browsers you mention.

ChrisD  2010-05-24 19:04:36
Correct. However, there's one gotcha to be aware of. While the HTML5 doctype will trigger standards compliant mode, assuming the page is being served as text/html, `<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">` won't. It'll cause limited-quirks mode instead. See http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/tokenization.html#the-initial-insertion-mode. If the OP's page relies on this, it'll break with the HTML5 doctype.
Alohci  2010-05-24 19:32:11
Another gotcha to be aware of.http://diveintohtml5.org/semantics.html#blank-space-gotcha
Aaron Wagner  2010-05-24 22:06:48

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