More on Mac IE5

Mon Apr 3 10:40:43 EDT 2000

According to a current post on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets,
Mac IE 5 has a not-yet-fully documented means of switching between a "tag
soup" compatibility mode and a much more strict set of rendering rules.
If a document has no Document Type Declaration, or has one that doesn't
reference the  W3C's URL, the browser goes into compatibility mode.  But
if there is a complete doctype declaration to a current strict or
transitional DTD, e.g.:

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

Then the browser goes into its standards mode.  There are reports that its
strict rendering is very unfriendly to sloppily tagged pages (which is
what I'd expect).

Some HTML editors put doctype declarations in automatically, without
guaranteeing that the resulting code is actually valid in the DTD
referenced.  That could mean serious problems for people whose browsers
use a doctype to switch between rendering modes.

The punchline, of course, is that Mozilla and Netscape 6 will do exactly
the same thing, and its presence in Mac IE suggests future adoption in Win
IE.

Heads up, taggers!

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu