Document Type Declaration

A document type declaration, or DOCTYPE, is an instruction that associates a particular SGML or XML document (for example, a webpage) with a document type definition (DTD) (for example, the formal definition of a particular version of HTML1.0 - HTML 4.0). In the serialized form of the document, it manifests as a short string of markup that conforms to a particular syntax.

The HTML layout engines in modern web browsers perform DOCTYPE "sniffing" or "switching", wherein the DOCTYPE in a document served as text/html determines a layout mode, such as "quirks mode" or "standards mode". The text/html serialization of HTML5, which is not SGML-based, uses the DOCTYPE only for mode selection. Since web browsers are implemented with special-purpose HTML parsers, rather than general-purpose DTD-based parsers, they don't use DTDs and will never access them even if a URL is provided. The DOCTYPE is retained in HTML5 as a "mostly useless, but required" header only to trigger "standards mode" in common browsers.

The general syntax for a document type declaration is:

In XML, the root element that represents the document is the first element in the document. For example, in XHTML, the root element is <html>, being the first element opened (after the doctype declaration) and last closed. The keywords SYSTEM and PUBLIC suggest what kind of Document Type Definition (DTD) it is (one that is on a private system or one that is open to the public). If the PUBLIC keyword is chosen then this keyword is followed by a restricted form of "public identifier" called Formal Public Identifier (FPI) enclosed in double quote marks. After that, necessarily, a "system identifier" enclosed in double quote marks, too, is provided. For example, the FPI for XHTML 1.1 is "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" and, there are 3 possible system identifiers available for XHTML 1.1 depending on the needs, one of them is the URI reference "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd". If, instead, the SYSTEM keyword is chosen, only a system identifier must be given. It means that the XML parser must locate the DTD in a system specific fashion, in this case, by means of a URI reference of the DTD enclosed in double quote marks. The last part, surrounded by literal square brackets ([]), is called an internal subset which can be used to add/edit entities or add/edit PUBLIC keyword behaviors. The internal subset is always optional (and sometimes even forbidden within simple SGML profiles, notably those for basic HTML parsers that don't implement a full SGML parser).

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