Selecting a DOCTYPE for HTML 5 + all browsers

html cross-browser doctype
Alex picture Alex · May 24, 2010 · Viewed 26.5k times · Source

I'm using some HTML5 features on a web page and wondered what the best DOCTYPE is. Currently, this is the DOCTYPE and XMLNS:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Should I use the new HTML 5 DOCTYPE?

<!DOCTYPE html>

Will older browsers (IE7, FF 2.x) recognize and render the page correctly? What's the best practice in this situation? Thanks.

Answer

ChrisD picture ChrisD · May 24, 2010

Yes, older browsers will work fine. The reason "<!DOCTYPE html>" was chosen in HTML 5 is because it is the smallest a doctype can be and yet still trigger standards compliance mode on those browsers you mention.

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