[whatwg] [html5] tags, elements and generated DOM

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Thu Apr 7 04:04:21 PDT 2005


On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> > 
> > Can you also explain the point of the <!DOCTYPE ...  gibberish that 
> > the specs require at the top of documents?  What are they doing, 
> > please remove them, they serve no purpose whatsoever.  Or if they do 
> > serve a purpose, document what the purpose is.
> 
> You should know the purpose I guess. (Standards mode.) I agree that it 
> should be documentated.

Actually come to think of it there is also a second purpose, namely, 
telling conformance checkers what version of the specification to check 
against. (Which I guess is basically the original purpose of the DOCTYPE.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



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