Re: DOCTYPE for php.net

Andrew Lindeman wrote:

I'd like to see PHP.net be compliant to some standard, probably HTML 4.0.1 Transitional (this is what it's current DOCTYPE heading has). It is *very* close to being there, except there hasn't been much of a standard so far, with part of the website compliant to HTML, and parts using XHTML tags (e.g. <br /> <link />, etc..). I think we should come up with a standard of what PHP.net should comply to and stick with it. Any comments?

Personally, I only use XHTML 1.0 Strict, but heres some facts for you: HTML 4.01 - fully supported by pretty much all browsers. Comes in 3 flavours: * Transitional (for pages that are still coming over from HTML 3.2) * Frameset (for frameset pages *only* - not the pages within the frames) * Strict (the document must fully conform to the HTML 4.01 spec) mime-type: text/html XHTML 1.0 - if the HTML compatability guidelines [1] are followed, fully support by most browsers as if it were HTML. This spec is *exactly* the same as HTML 4.01 except for the change to strictly lowercase and it needs to be wellformed XML (i.e. closing empty elements like <br />) Comes in the same 3 flavours as HTML 4.01 too mime-type: strictly speaking application/xhtml+xml, text/xml is also acceptable. Because this spec is a transitional spec, the W3C state that serving it as text/html whilst waiting for browsers to catch up (more on that later) is acceptable also. XHTML 1.1 - same as XHTML 1.0 except its modularised, moving different parts to different modules, which are used by adding an XML Namespace. mime-type: MUST be application/xhtml+xml - no exceptions Now, about the browsers and mime-types: All browsers pretty much support XHTML so long as the HTML compatability guidelines are followed (that space between the end of the elements content and the /> is not just eyecandy ;). All IE browsers DO NOT support the application/xhtml+xml mime-type. Instead they ask you to download the file then fail. Netscape 6/7 support it (and therefore all gecko based browsers) and parses it using the correct XML parser. Konq supports it but parses it as HTML, and Opera 7 supports it too with the XML parser. So, pretty much, XHTML 1.1 is out the window. I personally think that going with XHTML 1.0 is the way to go, because it can be transformed using XSLT straight from this format into any other XML dialect desired at any time in the future. News page to RSS/RDF, entire site to XHTML 2.0. The PHP.net website (main page at least) is *easier* to go to XHTML 1.0 than HTML 4.01, because two of the errors there at present are not errors, they cause another error, which also dissapears when they do, and the other errors are present in both XHTML 1.0 *and* HTML 4.01 Anyways, thats all I'm gonna say, cause this is getting really long now, but if you would like me to help moving the site towards a standard (any) then I would gladly do so. - Davey [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/guidelines.html