HTML Document Type (doctype)
by Denny Lancaster

The world has almost a generation of excellent web authors who have built beauty and information into their designs, but who do not know of or use the doctype, thanks to the “browser wars” of the late 1990's. At the height of the conflict browsers had completely different document object models or differences in their handling of HTML layout and white space, and a vast army of bugs, shortcomings, and flaws in their support for CSS. As designers fought the vast army of “shortcomings” they were taught by example and design bad habits and promoted thinking that ran counter to the W3C specifications. Even worse with their bag of tricks, these documents would only work in browsers that existed at the time and never validated.

Enters Sir Lancelot on his horse or DOCTYPE, which said in effect if you use type A, then your web site creation will appear thus and so in any compliant browser, designed for the future, in use now, or used in the past. This adoption was very useful for authors and DOCTYPE may have remained just a curiosity had it only been implemented in one browser, which was happily not the case and the door to standards-compliant web was thrown wide open.

Now that we are at this open door our curious mind wonders what is on the other side. If you plan to upgrade your old pages to new markup and

Finally use the DOCTYPE, you will surely encounter changes, which are profound such as an altered meaning for the properties width and height, and there are subtitle changes like inheritance into tables that can still wreak havoc with legacy designs. CSS differences will vary, depending upon the browser. However the biggest area of potential trouble relates to tables an their inheritance (or lack thereof) of styles. In older browsers, styles such as fonts and font sizes were not inherited into tables. Class and id values as to whether they are case insensitive are another problem.

Digital Historians are generally in agreement that three common ideas were present in the 1960's (1) the notion of separating “content and structure” encoding from specifications for (print) processing; (2) the notion of using names for markup elements which identified text objects “descriptively” or “generically”; (3) the notion of using a (formal) grammar to model structural relationships between encoded text objects. Some of these intellectual streams flowed into the standards work. How much or how many will remain a matter of personal interpretation rather than public record.3

Although our conclusion of a DOCTYPE may seem as a “stretch” for some readers, this author can't help but reflect upon the life and accomplishments of Alexander Graham Bell.

The telephone, and other Bell innovations like the microphone, reportedly was developed in part to assist people with hearing loss, while Visible Speech and the Audiometer were developed specifically for this purpose.

Bell taught deaf students at schools for the deaf (a school in London, Boston School for Deaf Mutes, the Clarke School for the Deaf, and at the American Asylum for the Deaf). He also opened a school for deaf and hearing students together, but the school had to be closed after just two years. It is perhaps as an advocate for the deaf that Bell made his most profound impact. Every deaf child who appealed to him found an open hand and an open heart. To the end of his life, he considered himself above all a “Teacher of the Deaf.”

And what of our blind or seeing impaired; those of us who encounter temporary disABILITIES who must rely on assistive devices like screen readers or view informational web pages in Lynx?
Now is both the time and place to put that little DOCTYPE into your web creations after your have validated the creation for W3C and WAI.

Denny Lancaster
Senior partner, tax attorney specializing in international finance, who learned ASL and old English signing at age 6, and have used these skills with YMCA groups in camp settings on a continuous basis to help our “special children.” Administer a private foundation, which builds free enabled computers for deaf and blind persons throughout the state of Alabama . . . Still learning HTML and having fun with Lancasters Laughing Place.