It’s time to get back to the study of web standards, XHTML, CSS and the techniques involved in writing lean, effective web pages. My most recent reminder to get back to this came when I realized how different the doctype declarations can be.
While I can’t recall precisely the language from Jeffrey Zeldman’s book, I know that at some point, after explaining doctype, he said, simply go here, view source and copy the doctype declaration. I believe it has changed slightly since the time of the book.
On page 157 of the book is this:<!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" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
And, from the www.zeldman.com website is:
<!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">
It took me the better part of an hour to do the trial-and-error work that finally made the code above appear as code. Until I changed all the greater-than and less-than signs to their ”special characters,” there was no code showing. I love the sites that can show the markup, write some narrative, then follow it with more lines of the actual markup. I have no idea whether I’ve done this the proper way, but at least you can see the differences between the book and the actual web page. I’ll have to learn why those differences exist and what the best way is. I’ll also confirm the method for showing markup on a web page when you’re actually describing the markup.
If I accept W3C and Zeldman as authorities, I cannot accept the doctype declaration that is automatically added to a new XHTML document created in NoteTab, TopStyle Pro or other editors. My personal experience thus far is that those editors put a different doctype declaration in the page. I don’t know why.
These are the kinds of issues that limit progress. Why is there such general agreement on the proper way to do things, but few (if any) of the tools actually deliver the preferred method? If I continually bog down at the doctype declaration, I never get to the CSS or the markup of the page!
Anyhow, the need to get back into this stuff is mounting. I plan to put some time and attention on it this weekend. One goal is to narrow the list of ”experts” to those that appear to agree on the fundamentals. Perhaps all of the experts already agree, and I’m simply overlooking something.
