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HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference, 3rd Edition
book

HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference, 3rd Edition

by Jennifer Robbins
May 2006
Intermediate to advanced
104 pages
2h 50m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference, 3rd Edition

Minimal Document Structure

This markup sample shows the minimal structure of an HTML 4.01 document. This example uses the Strict HTML DTD:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Document Title</title>
  </head>

  <body>
      Content of document . . .
  </body>
</html>

This markup sample shows the minimal structure of an XHTML 1.0 document as specified in the XHTML 1.0 Recommendation. This document is written using the XHTML Transitional DTD.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>Document Title</title>
  </head>

  <body>
      Content of document . . .
  </body>
</html>

In both examples, the first line is the Document Type Declaration (or DOCTYPE declaration) that declares the DTD version used for the document. It is used to check the document for validity. Some browsers also use the inclusion of a complete DOCTYPE declaration to switch into a standards-compliant rendering mode. Note that the XHTML document uses a different DOCTYPE declaration than the HTML document and includes XML namespace and language identification in the html root element.

XHTML documents may optionally include an XML declaration before the DOCTYPE declaration, as shown in this example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596527273Errata Page