Learning about Doctypes
Today was a very long day for me. I spent a bit of time trying to clean up the slowly dwindling pile of stuff in my living room. Somewhere in there I got to actually jump on the computer and update some things. Yet again I let the advice of a friend steer me away from my original intent (though I can understand why).
My co-worker today stated his opinion that a web page that is truly basic HTML should also include the doctype. Now this is not necessarily true in my opinion. Pretty much every site or book I've seen has not included doctype until later (doctypes didn't really come into use until HTML 4.0 anyhow). Sure, it is something all webpages should have, but not something that's absolutely required to get a page to render. In fact, I could just make a page with no tags on it, type a few lines, save as whatever.html and it will render if I opened it up in a web page (don't believe me, try it for yourself).
Now, if you want to follow the standards though, you need the doctype. Doing like I described above is like spelling phonetically (fonetikalee) and using sucky grammar. Sure you will still be understood, but is it the standard? No, so I can see his point, but I also wanted to just stick with the basics.
Anyhow, If you really want to conform to standards, you also need a couple of other elements to get it to clear the validator on the W3C website. I'll explain these in my lessons later (maybe have to push my lessons on lists back yet again). At any rate, in order to teach things the right way from the start, I'm stepping out on a limb and including in doctypes in my lesson for today. I had a couple of other things I wanted to say about the history of HTML, so I figured I'd just slide that in there. I also have gone back and made some small revisions to my other lessons.
For those of you in the other side of the globe and a day ahead of me, Happy New Year and see you next year, same blog, same Justin.
- Justin
