Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Use DTDs, they're there for a reason

<rant>
As the title of this post states, if you're a web developer, use a fucking DTD. They exist for a reason, that reason being to allow web browsers to have a reasonable expectation of the content and layout of your website so they can deliver the desired experience to your user. If you're a web developer and you don't know what a DTD is, then you're in serious fucking trouble. In the event that you don't know, DTD stands for Document Type Definition, and it's a single line of XML that goes at the very beginning of HTML documents and almost at the very beginning of XML documents (if they're validated by DTDs). An example of a DTD :

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">


That DTD is for a strictly validated XHTML 1.0 compliant HTML document. This means that it's strongly validated and web browsers can expect everything after it to be well-formed quality. That's right bitches, I use a good version of HTML and I'm standards compliant like a mofo.
</rant>

Sorry, but I just had to get that out. Lately, I'm being inundated with pages from our partners that don't use DTDs, don't validate to anything, and are just generally horrible markup. Now, normally, a person wouldn't need to care, but when your partners are lame and you have to scrape their pages for data, the lack of developing to a DTD becomes a giant pain in the ass.

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