XHTML Doctype
What is a Doctype Definition, DTD?
"A DTD, or document type definition, is a collection of XML declarations that,
as a collection, defines the legal structure, elements, and attributes that are
available for use in a document that complies to the DTD."
Basically, the doctype specifies the rules that apply to the markup of
a documents. All documents must have a DTD in the document before the root element, it should
always be the first line in an XHTML document.
There are 3 doctypes, Strict Transitional and Frameset.
XHTML-1.0-Strict
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
The Strict Doctype should be used when you want really clean code! Although it would be very
difficult to write code which will correctly validate against this. Use this together with Cascading Style Sheets.
XHTML-1.0-Transitional
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
This is probably what you should be using now. THis is normally used to take advantage of HTML's
preseatational features and also when you want to support browsers which don't understand
CSS.
XHTML-1.0-Frameset
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
Use this when you want to use frames.
Minimal Document with Transitional DTD
Here is a VERY basic XHTML document with a Transitional Doctype.
<!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">
<head>
<title>Document Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
For further information, please contact: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
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