No DOCTYPE

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John Townsend - 08 Nov 2007 22:05 GMT

I am using Publisher 2003, having last year moved across my website from
Publisher 97. A friend, who has much more technical knowledge than myself,
has pointed out that pages in my website have no DOCTYPE, which I gather
states the language it is written in (e.g. HTML). I understand that a
consequence of this is that some of the content is difficult to access using
Firefox.

Can anyone throw light on this, please? Is there a remedy?

Thanks and regards,

John Townsend

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DavidF - 08 Nov 2007 23:16 GMT

You can't really change the way that the Publisher coding engine works, but
you can improve the cross browser compatibility of your pages. Have you
actually viewed your pages in FireFox? If you are having problems first go
to Tools > Options and the web tab and uncheck "Rely on VML..." and "Allow
PNG..." and republish. If that doesn't fix any problems you are having with
the page loading in FF, then post a link to the problem page, and chances
are we can offer a fix.

If you care about how the code is written, then you should probably be using
a different program. If you want standards compliant code, then once again,
Publisher is not the program for you.

DavidF

>I am using Publisher 2003, having last year moved across my website from
>Publisher 97. A friend, who has much more technical knowledge than myself,
[quoted text clipped - 8 lines]
>
> John Townsend

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Mike Koewler - 08 Nov 2007 23:36 GMT

John,

Doctype is one of those things purists will care more about than
browsers. Yeah, HTML validators throw up flags about this, but it was
more of a concern years ago than now. As David says, if you design the
page correctly your site will not have any problems displaying in
different browsers. The only people who really need to care about this
are those designers who claim "I produce W3C compliant sites" and I can
tell you, most of them do not.

Mike

> I am using Publisher 2003, having last year moved across my website from
> Publisher 97. A friend, who has much more technical knowledge than myself,
[quoted text clipped - 8 lines]
>
> John Townsend

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Rob Giordano (Crash) - 09 Nov 2007 04:38 GMT

It's more than that.

If the doc type is incorrect for the page's code the browser will switch to
quirks mode and a quirky browser is a sad browser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode

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Rob Giordano
Microsoft MVP Expression

| John,
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