Comments on: It’s time to kill off Transitional DOCTYPEs

By: DaProfessor

DaProfessor — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 00:31:56 +0000

Why not change? Perhaps because for all the good things, there seems to be many bad ones. Phantom spacing for images by themselves in cells. CSS needed to apply something as simple as an underline (why do we feel the need to move away from [b] for bold, [u] for underline, etc.). All these things can be fixed, of course, but why change it when it was so simple before. The arguments I hear about it talk about 1.) say that it was “supposed” to be transitional (who cares, as long as it works we can stick with it), and the whole seperating format from content. I don’t know about you guys and gals, but I don’t have a lot of people coming along and saying, hey, let’s do this or that change with stylesheets. They usually want the whole thing redone if they’re going in that direction. And if not, I’ll bite the bullet and do a 2 second find and replace (in the included PHP files which typically replicate throughout the site anyways). I’m not buying it. Perhaps for huge corporate sites, but for small business sites, transistional’s just the easiest way to go.

By: Damien

Damien — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 11:39:06 +0000

Good article. I use XHTML Strict for one simple reason - its more reliable. Having documents render in standards mode in all browsers provides a more consistent result and doea away with a lot of the CSS headaches you can come across when using transitional doctypes or worse, no doctype and thus triggering quirks mode.

By: JackP

JackP — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 01:17:04 +0000

I don’t think anyone took “licence to design” seriously Kendall, so I’d not worry about that one. I still disagree although don’t worry I’m not going to suddenly start generating a Godwin.

So then, to summarise:
1) Pages with a DOCTYPE are better than those without
2) Valid pages are better than invalid ones
3) Valid STRICT pages are preferable to valid TRANSITIONAL ones.
4) When people agree on 90% of a subject they’ll always find the remaining 10% grounds for argument.

By: Kendall

Kendall — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:51:49 +0000

and disagree with Kendall â€” I wholeheartedly support the notion that the web is for everyone, not just professionals -

Well just to clarify (since I didn’t state my thoughts across all that well in my previous post) it’s not that I don’t think everyone has a place to contriibute to the web, but just that not just anyone should be putting up “entire sites” without knowing what they’re doing. Blogging, social sites, and the like are a great place for just about everyone. Though take a few minutes to browse a site like myspace and you’ll see why not everyone should be designing web sites. Hopefully that clears up my statements from before at least a little. And if you didn’t realize my license to design comment was simply me making a joke then you might want to learn to take life a little easier.

I also agree with Ed in his linked article about a cause of the problem partly being the tools that are being used to create web pages. It would be nice though if these tools and browsers could keep up with the web standards (not that I blame them, I know they’re trying).

Also, though no one specifically said I was an elitist I wouldn’t consider myself one. I just do web design as a fun hobby and happen to have my sites validate according to XHTML Strict. If that’s all it takes to be considered elitist then perhaps a new definition should be used.

By: JackP

JackP — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:42:43 +0000

Nice response, Ed (aka "Mr. Strict Doctype" — worth a read — go and look).

I would agree with you - and disagree with Kendall — I wholeheartedly support the notion that the web is for everyone, not just professionals - but that the professionals should be setting a good example!

Indeed, I welcome the fact that everyone and their granny — and their granny's dog — can blog. My original article on accessites explains why we on accessites insist on a strict doctype for the sites we grade.

What inspired the post though was my exasperation at people continuing to use a transitional doctype even though there post would have validated as strict. It's as if people were scared of the strict doctype, when it's not actually that hard to achieve.

By: Strict Doctype

Strict Doctype — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 17:48:43 +0000

[...]The elitists are doing the rounds again by advocating that the goal posts shift on what is required to produce a web site. The message this time is[...]

By: Kendall

Kendall — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 15:00:21 +0000

Indeed people need to move away from transitional when it is no longer needed. I feel the bigger problem is that there are more and more web sites being put out by non-web designers who don’t understand what they are doing. I partly feel only web designers should be allowed to create sites. Perhaps people should have to get a license in order to publish sites, like a driver’s a test. Yeah, that’ll never happen, but would be helpful. IE is also a big problem because it babies ill-written pages. If browsers stopped supporting bad pages it would force the creators to make decent pages. I know this’ll never happen, but one can dream.

Nice article.

By: Edward Clarke

Edward Clarke — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:39:57 +0000

Killing off the transitional doctype is a step too far. It is a transition but too many websites need to validate first, let alone grapple with a strict doctype. I’d rather recommend raising the bottom line than improving the top.

By: Nate K

Nate K — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 18:00:05 +0000

I couldn’t agree with you more in this post. I personally think that there is no reason to use a trans doctype. Now, I know if you are using legacy software or something that is out of your control that this might be hard to do - but it encourages the developer to step up to the plate to bring their website up to standards.

However, just as with web standards in general, it can take someone more time to really catch on or understand what a DTD is and how/where to use it (and its definitions).

By: 456 Berea Street

456 Berea Street — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 17:48:58 +0000

No more Transitional DOCTYPEs, please

The phasing out of Transitional DOCTYPEs is long overdue - they are called Transitional for a reason.