which doctype??

whats in doctypes? I've seen many recommend strict doctype but I'm sure I don't know what they do.

Check out this A List Apart article on doctypes. It's a very good read and explains why and which doctypes to use.

In a sentence, doctypes are essential to good practice, standards compliant, cross-browser consistent web design.

Thats a really good link aso, i remember reading this article a while back when i didnt understand doctypes very well. Im a 'strict' guy myself, whats everyone elses preferences?

As well ask telling the browser how to render your page etc, having s strict doctype is a good thing to have when designing if you can get your code to validate to strict

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Have a look here, it's an article from our Resident Writer on the WebForumz Creative Coding Newsletter.

Ed.

Nice article Ed, thanks

A List Apart also just came out with Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8. I just downloaded the MSIE 8 beta for my XP machine.

IE 8 is not even close to ready, I would't touch it let alone support it till a candidate release. It works but its quirky and is missing some support. Just an FYI it broke my stand alones and such causing IE 6 to render as IE 8 etc... Not saying this WILL happen but it has happened.

So just be careful with IE 8 at this time and prepare to roll back XP.

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I've heard extremely knowledgeable people say not to bother with XHTML at all, at this point, unless you have a definite reason to do so. HTML 4.01 Strict is quite good for a garden-variety webpage and is well-supported.

I always do XHTML 1.0 Strict mainly because it's fun and keeps me in touch with XML a bit, and because it's easy enough once you get through the adjustment. There's also a smidgin of prestige value. But it would be pretty far down on my list of recommended time/energy investments right now.

I'm currently learning xhtml strict. Is this the best way to go?

Strict is the way to go.

XHTML or HTML? It doesn't matter much. I don't like using XHTML because the browser will receive it as invalid HTML (assuming you serve it with a MIME type of text/html, which is what almost everyone does).

The real reason to use XHTML is if you need to work with XML, or want to use markup modules such as MathML.

In terms of "learning" XHTML, there's really nothing to learn. Its markup is almost identical to HTML.

XHTML is much more streamlined. Its leaner and meaner code, and yes it gives you the option for xml etc...

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