For quite some time, we've been outputting HTML pages with a
half-doctype declaration, with no DTD specified:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
Browsers interpret such a doctype as not quite reliable, and render
pages in so-called "quirks" mode for backwards compatibility with the
parsing and rendering bugs of earlier versions. It's been occasionally
suggested that it's superior to include also a URL to the DTD, which
will put browsers into a stricter, standards-compliant mode:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
A couple days ago I slipped this in. All well and good in Mozilla, but
in Internet Explorer 6.0 (I haven't tried 5.x) this triggers a selection
bug, such that trying to select text with the mouse selects everything
from the beginning of the document to the point where you've got the
mouse, instead of the portion of text you're dragging over. Not very
helpful.
Since, unfortunately, a lot of people use this dreadful program, and
this is a _really_ annoying browser bug, I've temporarily taken the DTD
reference back out, so we're back to quirks mode, where selection works.
Sigh...
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)