This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
Reported by Björn Höhrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>: <http://validator.w3.org:8001/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com>: Fatal Error: No DOCTYPE specified! I could not parse this document, because it does not include a DOCTYPE Declaration. A DOCTYPE Declaration is mandatory for most current markup languages and without such a declaration it is impossible to validate this document. You should make the first line of your HTML document a DOCTYPE declaration, for example, for a typical [29]XHTML 1.0 document: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> <head> <title>Title</title> </head> [29] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/ <body> <-- ... body of document ... --> </body> </html> For a list of possible DOCTYPE Declarations, please see the W3C QA Activity's [30]List List of Valid Doctypes. [30] http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html 1) I don't see any good reason to refuse validation completly. It's very simple to choose document types to default to, e.g. if element html has attribute xmlns default to XHTML 1.0 Transitional else default to HTML 4.01 Transitional 2) the page should display the revalidate form 3) It's "document type declaration", not "DOCTYPE declaration", please keep the terminology straight 4) The phrase talks about a "first line", while the document type declaration in the example takes two lines 5) The example should (as per XHTML 1.0) include a XML declaration 6) The example should (as per XHTML 1.0) use both, the lang and the xml:lang attribute 7) A "List List"? :-)
All issues and depends resolved (see dep tree for details). Closing.