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HTML Treehouse Club: HTML Publish a Story HTML Structure

Posted by Adam Tatusko
Adam Tatusko
16,589 Points

DOCTYPE

Does the DOCTYPE in <!DOCTYPE html> really need to be in all caps, as required by this code challenge? For example, view the page source for google.com.

4 Answers

Allison Hanna
Allison Hanna
36,222 Points
Allison Hanna
Allison Hanna
36,222 Points

Nope. It's case insensitive. All caps is one way that DOCTYPE can be written validly, and is a common convention. See this answer on Stack Overflow for an in-depth explanation: http://stackoverflow.com/a/9109157/5154624

Allison Hanna
Allison Hanna
36,222 Points
Allison Hanna
Allison Hanna
36,222 Points

If your team/company/project's style guide called for it, you'd write it in uppercase. The case, in this instance, is for human-readability only. To the computer, it is completely irrelevant. That's the nature of case insensitivity.

For contrast, and merely as an example, JavaScript is a case-sensitive language. A variable named myArr is completely distinct from one named myarr or one named MyArr or any other mix of cases. Or better yet, you can define a variable using var but not Var. Your while loop is correctly distinguished as while but WHILE will error out.

Jason Anello
PLUS
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 Points
Jason Anello
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 Points

Hi Adam,

No, it doesn't. I don't think the challenge should be requiring it.

Here's the relevant part of the html5 specification: https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#the-doctype

Item 1 from the first list -

  1. A string that is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "<!DOCTYPE".
Aurelian Spodarec
Aurelian Spodarec
10,801 Points
Aurelian Spodarec
Aurelian Spodarec
10,801 Points

Good practice to write uppercase since there are cases that it will need to be uppercase, but never lowercase, so uppercase should be really required for the sake of it.

Adam Tatusko
Adam Tatusko
16,589 Points

Please give me an example of a case that it would need to be uppercase?

Aurelian Spodarec
Aurelian Spodarec
10,801 Points
Aurelian Spodarec
Aurelian Spodarec
10,801 Points

//Remember, the document must be served as application/xhtml+xml to trigger HTML5 in XML serialization mode. The //DOCTYPE declaration is optional in XML mode, but if you don’t want to omit it, it needs to be uppercase.

https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/xhtml5#doctype

"
No, this is incorrect. In SGML the document type declaration is production 110, in XML it is production 28. In both cases it is declared as the fixed string "DOCTYPE" (which is not a tag, it is a keyword). So in the canonical definitions in the respective SGML and XML standards it is always uppercase. If you find software that permits a lowercase "doctype" that software is not in compliance with the standards. Browsers are designed to be "liberal in what they accept", but a compliant XML processor should flag this as a validation error"

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7020961/uppercase-or-lowercase-doctype/9109157#9109157

I use that in uppercase, it looks better for me anyways lol