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RE: Is doctype really important

for

From: Larry G. Hull
Date: Mar 15, 2004 8:28AM


As far as I'm aware, doctype isn't specifically part of Section 508
but the absence of doctype certainly can be an accessibility issue
inasmuch as (1) you can't use a tool to validate your code without a
specification (DTD) against which to validate and (2) poor and/or
browser specific (acceptable) code can give assistive technology
problems.

From the W3C HTML 4.01 Specification at
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#version-info

"A valid HTML document declares what version of HTML is used in the
document. The document type declaration names the document type
definition (DTD) in use for the document (see [ISO8879])."

In my opinion, browsers are sometimes a little too forgiving when
they accept (or ignore) bad or absent coding.

Larry

At 9:25 AM -0500 3/15/04, <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:
> >