[thelist] Netscape 6: Doctype Declarations Can Break Table La youts

Sat Dec 23 01:07:01 CST 2000

Morbus,

> Did you view source on the page? That's what "take a look at the code"
> means... you'll see the following:

	Hmm. I see.

> <!--<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">-->
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
>      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
>
> Basically, although it breaks the w3c validator, add a commented out
> doctype as the first line. Doesn't harm other browsers, and NS/Moz will
> read the second line only.

	I'm always open to other ways of doing things. I would like to point out,
however, that I provided a solution for the problem that I described, not
simply a workaround. And it validates.
	In my original post, my basic point was that I, as well as others, had
found that Netscape 6 broke table layouts that had worked fine not only in
other browsers, but also in preview releases of Netscape 6 and in late
Mozilla milestones. Some people had suggested that the root cause was likely
non-compliant code. However, my code was compliant, and Netscape 6 still
tweaked the tables.
	As a result of considerable experimentation, I discovered that the URI
portion of the doctype declaration for HTML 4.01 transitional affected how
Netscape rendered the tables, and in my post I noted which URI caused
Netscape to render the tables correctly. I suspect that you only read the
first paragraph of my original post, which just described the problem. If
so, I encourage you to read the rest of that post, as it will likely show
you how to rework your doctype declaration so that your pages will validate.

James Aylard