Choosing a DOCTYPE

sneakyimp

I'm in the process of starting an entirely new site and have the opportunity to specify coding standards to my team. I'm obviously going to specify UTF8 encoding to support all sorts of languages and odd chars, but I'm sort of wondering what DOCTYPE to use. I wanted 4.01 strict but this article says that doesn't support frames which may be necessary:
http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/doctype.html

Sadly, this project may require some use of frames or iframes to integrate with a legacy site.

Does anyone have any thoughts on selection of doctypes?

bradgrafelman

Not sure what your question is... if you "must" use frames, then you're left with one option.

So.. are you asking us to pick which option we like best out of the single available option?

EDIT: Okay make that two (forgot that XHTML even supported frames).

Still, my process for selecting which doctype is best to use when frames must be used would be:

Determine reasons frames "must" be used.
Can those reasons be avoided? If yes, proceed to step 3. Otherwise, return to step 1.
Use the latest available released/approved/whatever-you-want-to-call-it standards (HTML5, in other words).

🙂

sneakyimp

Thanks for the response!

HTML 4.01 has two options for frames: FRAMESET and TRANSITIONAL. Then there's HTML 1 with transitional and strict variants. And there's also XHTML with its versions and variants. Seems to me there are quite a few DOCTYPE variants to choose from and I was just hoping for opinions and anecdotes -- ideally practical experiences.

Personally, I don't think HTML5 is ready for primetime yet.

bradgrafelman

sneakyimp wrote:
HTML 4.01 has two options for frames: FRAMESET and TRANSITIONAL.

It's been too many years since I've even messed with frames, I guess I'm out of touch on the older doctypes (e.g. the differences between frameset and transitional declarations).

sneakyimp wrote:
Then there's HTML 1

Yup.. and there's Windows 95 and 28.8k dialup modems, too. :p

sneakyimp wrote:
And there's also XHTML with its versions and variants.

Blah. I never did fully jump on the XHTML bandwagon, to be honest. I think this page sums up my thoughts when it declares:

Switching from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0 brings almost no direct benefits for the visitors of your Web site

Okay, so the benefits are for me? Well converting crap to XHTML (guess this isn't really an issue if you're starting afresh) had no 'benefit' to me other than to generate more work I could bill a client for. In that aspect, aye, it was quite beneficial.

Otherwise, not so much. Is it nice that it's more strictly structured (a la XML) and perhaps easier to parse? Sure... assuming any of that matters to you. If not, see the quote above.

sneakyimp wrote:
Personally, I don't think HTML5 is ready for primetime yet.

Why?

Weedpacket

The list of recommended doctypes is at
http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html

sneakyimp wrote:
I wanted 4.01 strict but this article says that doesn't support frames which may be necessary:

That's because a strict frameset document is different from an "ordinary" HTML document (most notably, it has a <frameset> element and not a <body>). It's a different type of document, and hence has a different document type definition.

sneakyimp

Thanks weedpacket for the link. Nice to have something resembling an official DOCTYPE tag. Thanks BG for that article on XHTML. I'm just the kind of stickler that likes the hard way so I'm hoping it's XHTML 1.0 strict for me. I think I'm allowed to do that as long as I don't have iframes in my content.

Weedpacket, I appreciate your point about framesets being different, but what about iFrames? I've been reading the DTD documents and other links and apparently one must use the transitional or frameset doctypes to use an iframe. Yes, I know iFrames are awful but they also happen to be a useful kludge under certain circumstances -- especially when a client is requesting entirely unreasonable deadlines. It kind of sucks that one must abandon strict rendering in order to support a measly iframe. I've found strict to be much more cooperative when attempting precise CSS styling that works across many browsers.

As for HTML5, I might have phrased it wrong when I said it isn't ready for prime time. I don't trust it as a doctype. My reason for not trusting it is that it doesn't seem to be as widely implemented as one might hope. I'm running Firefox 3.6 on this Ubuntu desktop. I'm a little gun-shy about upgrading to 4 because things seem to to stop working when I upgrade too many things. At any rate, my browser scores only 155 out of 400 on this test: http://html5test.com/results.html

There are also a lot of Red X's on this HTML5 feature support matrix -- most of which are under IE. According to this site, IE is still used by 24% of the web-browsing populace -- and only a tenth of them are up to IE9. About half of web browsers are using Firefox, but half of them are using 3.6.

I seriously doubt I'll be using any of the bleeding-edge HTML5 innovations any time soon, but I would like to have the site I'm working on render consistently across the various browsers. I'm working on a coding standards manual for my team and -- thanks to the aforementioned unreasonable deadlines -- I'm really trying to pick something robust and reliable. The site design features a lot of AJAX and may require iFrames for speedy integration with a legacy website.

Weedpacket

Also there is no formalised standard for HTML 5 yet (only a Working Draft.

sneakyimp wrote:
The site design features a lot of AJAX and may require iFrames for speedy integration with a legacy website.

Yes, iframes are not part of the Strict doctype; to use them would require the Transitional doctype (I believe their appearance in the Frameset doctype is to allow for them appearing in the <noframes> fallback element). But by your own description, this is for a transitional purpose.

As for XHTML, I haven't really found the differences to be that significant - mainly because I've tended to go along with HTML best practices (quoting attribute values and the like) which XML generally just codified that I never found myself writing stuff like

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<title</><body>

Which is a perfectly legitimate HTML document.