HTML Tutorial – 18 – Standards
Every HTML document should begin with a reference to a Document Type Definition (DTD), or doctype, to be standard compliant. This definition declares which version of the HTML standard that the document follows and must be placed before the <html> element. The three versions defined are: strict, transitional and frameset.
Strict definition
The strict definition includes only the structural markup without any of the deprecated elements or attributes. Instead, it leaves formatting up to CSS.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/HTML4/strict.dtd">Transitional definition
The transitional definition includes everything that is deprecated and is intended to smooth the transition over to the strict definition.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/HTML4/loose.dtd">Frameset definition
The frameset definition is used by frame documents. It contains the same elements as the transitional definition, except that it includes the frameset elements.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/HTML4/frameset.dtd">XHTML definitions
There are corresponding versions for XHTML documents.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
Meta tag
Another standard that should be followed is to include metadata in the document, using the <meta> header tag. The tag requires either the name or http-equivalent attribute, paired with the content attribute. The http-equivalent attribute will cause the metadata to be sent as HTTP header information. The most important metadata is the document’s file format and its character encoding.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/HTML; charset=iso-8859-1">
For XHTML documents another MIME type and subtype are used.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=iso-8859-1" />
Metadata can also be used to help search engines by providing a description of the document and a list of keywords relating to its content.
<meta name="description" content="document description"> <meta name="keywords" content="list, of, keywords">
Another common use of the <meta> tag is to automatically redirect a visitor to a new page after a specific number of seconds.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=newpage.html">
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