Document declarations

Sun Aug 27 09:18:51 EDT 2000

As I caught up with Web4Lib mail today via the web, I conducted a massively
informal survey (hit ten websites mentioned in postings) and observed that
none of them included HTML declaration statements... (to cite an example of
these: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> )
Sunsite (the 11th site I hit) was the only website to *include* such a
statement in its code.

Do folks not care?  Is it because they aren't generated by editors such as
FrontPage? Is the assumption that if the page displays under most
conditions, it's not important?

When teaching basic HTML concepts, I've taken W3C's guidance quite literally
(with respect to version info, q.v.
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.2 )... should I be
less vigilant in adherence to the standard?

Karen G. Schneider kgs at bluehighways.com
Assistant Director of Technology
Shenendehowa Public Library, Clifton Park, NY
http://www.shenpublib.org