[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia pages DTD

Mon Dec 30 19:02:28 UTC 2002

Hello everyone,

My apologies if this has been discussed before, but I just noticed that 
Wikipedia pages carry a doctype declaration of
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

Since this does not include the URL to a full DTD, the curse of doctype 
sniffing sees most browsers render the page in "Quirks" or "Bugwards 
compatible" mode rather than "strict" mode. In the interests of making 
wikipedia accessible, I think it would be better to force strict mode - 
then editors would be more likely to notice markup errors which affect the 
rendering on browsers which do not correct for bad markup.
-- 
Richard Grevers
CHristchurch, NZ