<!DOCTYPE ...> required for HTML 2.0?

"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>

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Date: Wed, 13 Jul 94 21:24:04 EDT
Message-id: <9407140123.AA17786@ulua.hal.com>
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-ig@oclc.org>
Subject: <!DOCTYPE ...> required for HTML 2.0?
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The current working draft of the spec says that an HTML data
stream is supposed to be a complete SGML document, i.e. it's
supposed to include the
	<!DOCTYPE HTML ...>
stuff.

The spec also says that many html body parts don't have that,
and implementations are encouraged to infer a given prologue.

Now that I think about this, this is not quite "descriptive
of current practice."

Well... it agrees with current practice -- that is, if
you send a document with "<!DOCTYPE ...>" at the beginning,
all the browsers I've seen Do The Right Thing, i.e. they
ignore it :-)

For the purposes of the 2.0 spec, should we say that the
body of a text/plain MIME body part should be a complete
SGML document entity, or just the instance part?

i.e. which of the following are legal, and which are
just "widely tolerated"?

	Content-Type: text/html

	<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "...">
	<title>my document</title>
	...

vs.
	Content-Type: text/html

	<title>my document</title>

	...

Dan