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How does one determine what 'Doc type' to put at the top of a webpage. As Frontpage doesn't do this 'auto-like'. I've never been really all that concerned, but I'd like to know.
Is it safe to say the a plain html website (no flash or other fancy stuff), with nothing out of the ordinary (at least as far as I'm concerned) is a specific 'Doc Type"? If so, what type?
Thanks,
Wiz 
I cried because I had no shoes - until I saw a man who had no feet...
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I recall reading somewhere that is not an essential if you are using just plain html.
But if you have active pages it evidently helps in page displays in some brrowsers.
An article on this
Normal HTML should have this DocType (I'm pretty sure...)
Code: html
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
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Thanks people. Appreciate the help.
Wiz 
I cried because I had no shoes - until I saw a man who had no feet...
You should have a Doctype declaration. It tells the spiders which version of html you are using so that it can read your site correctly. Also, if you want to validate your html with the w3.org organization for clean code (and faster downloading and improved SEO) you must have a doctype declaration. You can go to the w3.org page and it will show you examples of doctypes: probably one of the most common is the 4.01 - but transitional - not strict.
Check it out.
Cluny
See what W3C says about your question: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/Doctype
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clunygrey wrote:
You should have a Doctype declaration. It tells the spiders which version of html you are using so that it can read your site correctly. Also, if you want to validate your html with the w3.org organization for clean code (and faster downloading and improved SEO) you must have a doctype declaration. You can go to the w3.org page and it will show you examples of doctypes: probably one of the most common is the 4.01 - but transitional - not strict.
Check it out.
Cluny
A spider does not care about the Doctype because it does not "read" your site anyway. Well it reads your site but not in the same way that a person does - it does not render the page so the Doctype is useless.
When a spider "reads" your site its reading is a plain HTTP GET - the DocType is not relevent to a spider at all.
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If you site is edited with XHTML, the XHTML recommendation requires the doctype, even if most browsers probably ignore it. And if we start talking about semantics here, it is obvious that it is useful defining the type of your documents.
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Mutilated is right, although there are plenty of reasons to have the correct doc-type. I think the biggest two reasons would be forward compatability as well as putting together a semantically logical document.
But make no mistake, a search engine is not going to have any problems with your site if the doc-type is wrong or even missing. SE's are interested in the content of your page, not how much you know about HTML or XHTML.
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Fully agree with Mutilated and sitereference.
Spider's Crawling has nothing to do with doc type.
DocType simply tells the validator what language you are using, this will not help you in search engines but it will help in making your page compliant. Your markup and CSS won’t validate without them.
ALA has a great article covering this very topic here http://www.alistapart.com/stories/doctype/
but I will post the correct ones here.
DOCTYPES THAT WORK
HTML 4.01 Strict, Transitional, Frameset
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
XHTML 1.0 Strict, Transitional, Frameset
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">XHTML 1.1 DTD
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
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