To <!DOCTYPE> or not to <!DOCTYPE>

johreiki · #1 (**permalink**) 03-16-2004, 05:50 PM

I've been reading Jeffrey Zeldman's "Designing with Web Standards" and loving what he says about the wisdom of us crawling out of our Neanderthal caves -- designing pages with all the streamlining allowed by current CSS capabilities; designing for "modern" browsers instead of doing all sorts of "illegal" and laborious contortions with HTML in order to trick dinosaur browsers like Netscape 4 into displaying things they way we want them to appear.

He makes such a good case for separating Structural elements from Presentational elements -- confining Structure to HTML and Presentation to CSS....and simply ACCEPTING that our work will not look as good in the dinosaur browsers!

So, feeling totally liberated of the Neanderthal mentality I've been carrying for so long, I started making pages in XHTML, as he recommends in the book. I was loving it, and the pages looked great (in IE6), and they even validated in the W3C validator (I'm sure these are the only pages I've ever made that would even come close to doing that!). And then I noticed that my custom scrollbar had suddenly disappeared, replaced by the default version.

After checking and re-checking all my code and finding nothing out of place, I now discover that custom scrollbars are ILLEGAL in XHTML!!

I was using the <!DOCTYPE> and <html> tags below....

<!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 wondered what would happen if I removed the <!DOCTYPE> tag and kept the <html> tag. Guess what - the page displayed properly, even retaining the custom scrollbar.

Then I removed even the reference to XHTML from the <html> tag -- leaving an old-fashioned, basic <html> tag -- and still the page displayed properly, including custom scrollbar!

So, it seems, we CAN do custom scrollbars in XHTML, as long as we don't tell the browser we're using XHTML!

After all this, I have 2 questions:

1) Is there no problem using the basic <html> tag when the page is actually written in XHTML? (Apparently the / to close image tags, etc. is simply ignored by HTML...?)

2) Isn't the <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> tag, by itself, subjecting the page to the rules of XHTML? (Apparently not, since it allows the custom scrollbar to be displayed...)

Thanks in advance for your wisdom ------

_||_
db

matauri · #2 (**permalink**) 03-16-2004, 11:14 PM

Are you talking about customizing scroll bars by changing their colour? And when you validated, was it with an external css file? And if so, did you validate the css?

To my knowledge, customized scroll bars arent supported by xhtml, but are also only supported by IE & not other browsers.

My reckoning would be that the XHTML doctype didnt display the customization, whereas the HTML would. But if you had the formatting in a separate css file, then the XHTML page would still validate, even though it wouldnt show the scroll bar.

Have you checked it in other browssers apart from IE? There are many customisations that arent supported from browser to browser,or from HTML to XHTML, hence why there are so many hacks in place to deal with them. The reasoning behind XHTML was to try & make code compatable with all current & future technologies.

mikmik · #3 (**permalink**) 03-16-2004, 11:31 PM

Quote:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Factor1 Web Design Development Building Maintenance Kelowna, BC</title>
<meta name="Description" content="." /><meta name="Keywords" rsanol" />
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mainmik.css" />
<style type="text/css"> p[id] { color: red; }
* html #test-span {
color:green;}

</style>

</head>

Valid XHTML 1.0 strict, beeyoootiful colors on scrollbar LOL
:o)

johreiki · #4 (**permalink**) 03-17-2004, 05:49 AM

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