DTD's

plowman · December 29th, 2005, 06:20 PM

Hi i've just finished designing a web page and now when i add a DTD, as w3c advise, it messes up the layout slightly.

Does this mean that my HTML is not written well enough for HTML 4.01? I think this because the layout is only messed up when i add a DTD for HTML 4.01 strict, or transitional, but not when i use the lower versions like 3.2...

Can someone tell me what a DocType Decloration actually does...and why my page physically changes when i add one....

thanks in adv.

large_nostril · December 29th, 2005, 11:30 PM

The DocType Decloration tells the rendering engine which document format (standard) to render the page with... Here's some more info about DocType if you're interested.

You can try using this DocType, it might help fix your issue:

Code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

You should also check your HTML for validity (standards compliance) with this Markup Validation Service from W3C. Also note that even if your HTML is 100% valid, it may render "incorrectly" in certain browsers (IE is notorious for this

).

plowman · December 30th, 2005, 05:38 AM

Ok, thanks for the info...but adding that DTD doesn't help. Firefox and Netscape render my HTML differnently to IE 6 when i add a DTD, but still not how i want it.

The problem seems to be that when i add a DTD, the height="100%" attribute of my table is ignored. I think it just becomes the vertical size that is required...

This doesn't happen with the width though-perhaps because i have nested tables inside cells???

Do you know any other way of strechting a table vertically???

Thx people.

large_nostril · December 30th, 2005, 06:48 AM

Ah! I remember that problem all too well... The height attribute for tables actually isn't supposed to be supported by any browser. However, a simple workaround is to use CSS style properties to set the table height... examples:

Code:

<TABLE style="height:100%;">
  <TR>
    <TD>Something</TD>
  </TR>
</TABLE>

or

Code:

<TABLE style="height:200px;">
  <TR>
    <TD>Something Else</TD>
  </TR>
</TABLE>

plowman · December 30th, 2005, 07:19 AM

Thanks but that doesn't seem to work. Shall i just insert lots of rows above and below my content, and then put  's in them? thx for your help dude.