netcommr — Fri, 09 Nov 2001 22:00:30 +0000

I see them as being required by future browsers to render the document properly.

The opening tag of an html document is but does not contain any version info for the browser. This limits the browsers capability or will slow it down having to figure it out.

I think it is a good practice to just get in the habit of starting all pages now with a

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#version-info
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006#dt-doctype

Busy — Fri, 09 Nov 2001 21:38:22 +0000

I think the most common 3 HTML ones are
strict, transitional and frameset

strict is to the letter standards but since this isnt suited to earlier browsers, isnt wise, have to dot every i and cross every t, cant use link targets, body margins and deprecated tags

transitional is new with the old, with the rest of the tag set to 4.0 it conforms to the html 4.0 standards but also degrades for the older browsers

frameset is for frames

are they necessary? to validate your site you do really need them, other than that I dont think so.

I always just use transitional, with or without style sheets it works fine

I'm sure someone else can give you a more techo description