Key Points

  • There are three document types you can specify with the DOCTYPE tag: transitional, strict, and frames. In this book, we use the transitional document type.

  • If you do not specify a document type, most browsers will read your page in quirks mode that is more lenient than regular HTML, but less capable.

  • The DOCTYPE tag is placed before (above) the opening <html> tag, and begins with an exclamation point. For example:

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C/DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://
    www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
  • All the HTML coding in a document (except the DOCTYPE) is enclosed within a two-sided <html> tag.

  • The <html> and </html> tags include the <head> and <body> sections.

  • The <head> area contains the page title (<title>) and any keywords ...

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