Another case in which I feel I am returning to the days as a contract site designer. I have been working on some email templates, something I haven’t done in years. Ah, developing in tables again! I have done some reading on what various email clients support, and the purist in me wanted to code to a specific version of HTML. I started to look at adding attributes directly to the body tag (remember ALINK and VLINK), only to see they had been deprecated back for HTML4. I started to look back at references for HTML3.2, only to make an interesting discovery.
Once upon a time, back in the dark ages of HTML3.2, DOCTYPES weren’t fully qualified.
On A List Apart, Jeffrey Zeldman had noted that:
Scattered throughout W3C’s site are DOCTYPEs with missing URIs, and DOCTYPEs with relative URIs that point to documents on W3C’s own site. Once removed from W3C’s site and used on your web pages, these URIs point to non–existent documents, thus fouling up your best efforts and the browser’s.
…and I found this to be the case even with the HTML3.2 recommendation itself (whether or not you believe me, follow the link to marvel at the old school background image!). I thought I simply had to do some more research online to find what I was looking for. But lo and behold, I ended my search at the W3C QA Recommended list of DTDs to use in your web document.
I have been working in the field for quite awhile, but it amazes me sometimes what I take for granted. I recognize the importance of using a DOCTYPE, but now I wonder if I truly understand it. Is the URI not needed because the parser knows the definition for HTML3.2?
