Re: Javascript question

Boyd, Todd M. wrote:

Before some of you newbies feel like being heroes and jump all over me: I KNOW THIS IS A PHP-RELATED LIST. IF YOU DON'T LIKE MY QUESTION, DON'T ANSWER IT. Now that that's out of the way... I have a Javascript question (and maybe a Browser/DOM question) for you folks. I'm not sure this is anything they teach you in any online/in-seat/self-taught Javascript course that I've ever seen before, so I figured I would bring it here. My boss asked me if I knew of a tool that would change the <!DOCTYPE> of a page on-the-fly to test validation in different schemes (i.e., XHTML Strict, Transitional, Loose, etc.).

The validators generally don't trigger javascript. I use DOMDocument to create a valid xhtml page and then before sending it to the browser - if the browser does not report accepting valid xhtml (or I specify I want html) it filters the page to valid html 4.01. That's probably what you want to do - code for valid xhtml and filter the output to other DTD's you want to make available server side rather than trying to use JS to alter the DOCTYPE. Remember, the proper header to send also relies on the DOCTYPE so if you sent a header for xhtml but send html (or vice versa) you are still breaking the standard regardless of how pristine your output is. Another advantage to building the document ahead of time and doing any translations server side is you can also filter the output for XSS in case you missed validating some input.