{"id":364,"date":"2007-04-08T10:34:02","date_gmt":"2007-04-08T00:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2007\/04\/08\/what-are-the-correct-dtd-incantations\/"},"modified":"2007-10-07T19:54:02","modified_gmt":"2007-10-07T09:54:02","slug":"what-are-the-correct-dtd-incantations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2007\/04\/08\/what-are-the-correct-dtd-incantations\/","title":{"rendered":"What are the correct DTD incantations?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Web,<\/p>\n

I am having trouble getting my head around a new technology, and I just needed someone to take it through with, until I understand.<\/p>\n

If I can explain my problem clearly, perhaps I will see the solution myself – or at least get the part of my brain that comes up with solutions in the shower to start thinking about it.<\/p>\n

\n

In the EmailShroud 2.0 plugin, I use a couple of non-standard attributes on the anchor tag.<\/p>\n

While that means it doesn’t validate, I expect everyone’s browser to ignore the attributes they don’t understand; I was happy to deliver with that.<\/p>\n

I didn’t even bother to fix it in EmailShroud 2.1 (currently being alpha tested on this site – let me know<\/a> if you see any odd behaviour).<\/p>\n

However, now I am looking at cleaning it up and ensure it exhibits nothing but pure validation goodness for the release after next.<\/p>\n

Option 1<\/h4>\n

I could remove the use of custom attributes, and try to tunnel the same information through existing attributes, such as class or id. It might be possible to get this to mostly work, but it would be not The Right Thing™.<\/p>\n

I need to weave some DTD<\/acronym> magic here. Let’s get the incantations ready.<\/p>\n

Option 2<\/h4>\n

I could reference the external DTD, and then add some extra attributes with an additional “Internal DTD”, i.e. add the extra attributes via incantations on each page. <\/p>\n

This works in Opera, but Firefox and IE7 leave an unsightly “]>” mess at the top of the page. [Ref<\/a> + testing] It seems odd that they both have the same bug – have I missed something here?<\/p>\n

Option 3<\/h4>\n

I could find the original DTD for XHTML and modify it to include the new attributes. Then I could host it on SomethinkOdd, and have the plugin point to this DTD in the header of each HTML.<\/p>\n

This idea has several flaws.<\/p>\n