On Sun, 29 Jun 2003 21:30:47 -0700, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> gave
utterance to the following:
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.
I don't use MSIE for anything other than checking pages to see how many
hacks I have to work in to make IE behave, but in all of my time reading
HTML groups and forums where the standard advice is to use a fully-
qualified DTD, I have never heard mention of such a bug. Are you sure that
there isn't some other markup error in the Wikipedia pages which is
combining to create the effect in IE?
--
Richard Grevers
Women are like watches: The finer the movement the better the time