Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Do we actually need DOCTYPE any longer?
|
For epub2, you need a DOCTYPE for DTDs. For epub3 (HTML5), <!DOCTYPE html> is valid and since epub3 does not support DTDs, nothing else needs to be used. Since DOCTYPE is rather useless for epub3, some programs no longer automagically add it. Unfortunately, if you are still creating epub2 documents, the DOCTYPE is still needed. Oddly epubcheck will not flag this as an error but will flag using named entities (i.e. nbsp) as an error since the standard epub2 DTD defines those named entities. "<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">"
The other issue I've found with not having a DOCTYPE is that several renderers will render the document in Quirks mode which can result in some odd looking pages. See
Quirks Mode and Standards Mode of what using quirks/standard/almost standard modes involves.