Document Type: HTML5
Posted: Mon May 30, 2022 3:39 pm
When creating new projects are there any reasons for the default document type not to be HTML5?
In HTML 4.01, the DOCTYPE declaration refers to a document type definition (DTD). A DTD defines the structure and the legal elements of an XML document. Because HTML 4.01 was based on the Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML), referring to a DTD in the DOCTYPE declaration was necessary.
Additionally, doctypes for HTML 4.01 required the declaration of either strict, transitional, or frameset DTD, each with a different use case as outlined below.
Strict DTD: Used for web pages that exclude attributes and elements that W3C expects to phase out as CSS support grows
Transitional DTD: Used for web pages that include attributes and elements that W3C expects to phase out as CSS support grows
Frameset DTD: Used for web pages with frames
In contrast, the declaration of HTML5 DOCTYPE is much simpler: it no longer requires a reference to DTDs as it is no longer based on SGML. See the examples below for a comparison between HTML 4.01 and HTML5 DOCTYPEs.
Examples
Doctype syntax for HTML5 and beyond:
<!DOCTYPE html>
Doctype syntax for strict HTML 4.01:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
Doctype syntax for transitional HTML 4.01:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
Doctype syntax for frameset HTML 4.01:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
During the formative years of HTML, web standards were not agreed upon yet. Browser vendors would build new features in whatever way they wanted. There was little concern for competing browsers.
The result was that web developers had to choose a browser to develop their sites for. This meant that sites would not render well in unsupported browsers. This situation could not continue.
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) wrote a set of web standards to handle this situation. All browser vendors and web developers should adhere to these standards. This would ensure that websites would render well across browsers.
The changes required by the standards were quite different from some existing practices. Adhering to them would break existing non standards compliant websites.
To handle this problem, vendors began programming rendering modes in to their browsers. Web developers would need to add a doctype declaration to the top of an HTML document. The doctype declaration would tell the browser which rendering mode to use for that document.
Three separate rendering modes were generally available across browsers.
Full standards mode renders pages according to the W3C web standards.
Quirks mode renders pages in a non standards compliant way.
Almost standards mode is close to full standards mode, but features support for a small number of quirks.
In the modern age of HTML5, web standards are fully implemented in all major browsers. Web sites are generally developed in a standards compliant way. Because of this the HTML5 doctype declaration only exists to tell the browser to render the document in full standards mode.
Usage
The Doctype Declaration must be the very first line of code in an HTML document, aside from comments, which can go before it if needed. For modern HTML5 documents the doctype declaration should be as follows:
<!DOCTYPE html>
I hope the detailed elaboration helps to understand more advanced. Below are WWB help section informations
Document Type
The doctype declaration is an instruction for the web browser about what version of the markup language the page is written in.
Currently WYSIWYG Web Builder supports 3 document types:
HTML 4.01 Transitional (default)
The generated output will be HTML and compliant to the HTML 4.01 specification of W3C (just like in previous versions of WYSIWYG Web Builder).
XHTML 1.0 Transitional
The generated output will be XML and compliant to the XHTML 1.0 specification of W3C.
HTML5
The generated output will be HTML and compliant to the HTML 5 specification of W3C. For some features (like HTML5 events, CSS3 styles. this option needs to be selected)
Select document type 'None' if you don't want to include the doctype declaration in the page output.
The generated output will be HTML 4.01 Transitional in that case.