What are the foundations of a valid XHTML document? What do I need to know about DOCTYPE, XML Prolog and Character Encoding? Until recently, I had quite a hard time answering such questions, but doing some research lately, I hope I found the correct answers.
I first discovered Web Standards while taking part in a seminar at my university in 2003. It was the time when I decided that Web Development is the way to go for me. Since then, when creating a website, I copy and pasted things like the DOCTYPE or the Character encoding definition into my document and went on marking up my page.
What I forgot about and noticed recently, is, that it might be good to know something more about the parts that I am simply pasting into my document, without really knowing in detail what they mean. Don’t get me wrong, I had a rough understanding about what Strict and Transitional means and that there are several different kinds of Character encodings out there, but I did not spend that much time further thinking about it. Copy and paste seemed just fine for me.
Anyways, I did some investigation lately and put the outcome in a small article, primarily for my own reference, not to forget about such things anymore. You can find the article Valid XHTML Document: The Basics in the Code Section of this site. Feel free to check it out and if you think that I got something wrong or have something to add, please do so by adding your comment here or leave me a message. Thanks.