FW: [WEB4LIB] Document declarations

Mon Aug 28 09:55:30 EDT 2000

I think you'll find that every page in our primary site at 

http://www.mpls.lib.mn.us/

has a proper DTD and follows it. 

Some items that we serve do not; notably pages that are served
by our Innopac system. 

--Charles Gimon

-----Original Message-----
From: Karen G. Schneider [mailto:kgs at bluehighways.com] 
Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2000 8:24 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Document declarations

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