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minorgod · #9 12-11-2006, 01:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by carpeperdiem

from my 4.1.3's /skin1/home.tpl

Code:

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

What does this mean? "transitional"? I guess I'm living in the dark ages.

Does this mean certain tags in some mods provided by 3rd parties may be out of date? Do you know a utility that I can run the site through and have the tags checked for compatibility?

thanks...

Jeremy

Using the Transitional doctype will tell your browser to render the XHTML/CSS in "quirks mode" which fixes many of the browser bugs that keep XHTML/CSS pages from displaying consistently on some browsers and I think it also allows some tags to validate that would not otherwise validate. Using the "Strict" doctype will force your browser to use strict XHTML/CSS standards to render the page and is generally more difficult (but not impossible) to use for multicolumn layouts.

I know BOOMER (CartLabs) is working on an XHTML template for x-cart 4.x that is supposed to be released tomorrow (December 12), but I don't know if it will be strict or transitional. If it's strict, I am considering buying it to use as a starting point for my own XHTML 1.0 Strict template.

FYI, the latest X-Cart release (v4.1.4) is XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant and I have checked the validation to make sure it validates and it does, but it is not a "tableless" layout. Standards compliance and "tableless" layout are two different things, but they are usually lumped together in discussions on the subject. It is possible (though not advisable) to build a fully XHTML Strict layout using tables, but that sort of defeats the purpose of XHTML, which is to provide proper semantic structure to HTML documents.

Regading your question about tags such as "<br />", this is the proper XHTML format for any tags that do not have an explicit closing tag (meaning any tags that do not have a separate closing tag). So if you're converting from HTML to XHTML, you will need to find all your <br>,<img> and <hr> tags and add the closing slash to them. I can't think of any other tags that need this, but there may be some others.

Hope that helps.