Netscape 6 and Dreamweaver
Just a note that maybe will save someone else the headache I had yesterday.
If you're using Dreamweaver - and create a new HTML page - it automatically sets your doctype like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
This caused a problem with a table-based design I had done. Images placed inside cells of a table had this odd space after all of them. Even though I had specified the table, and it's cells to the exact width and height of the image, as well, there was no space in the HTML itself. It only would happen on Netscape 6 - and as soon as I removed the doctype declaration - it went away.
April 2nd, 2004 at 2:34 pm
I don't know if this applies to Netscape 6, or even if this is the problem you specifically had, but I remember back in the NN 4.x days, Netscape would enter a space in a table cell if the closing table data tag was on a separate line. example:
<td>
This is stuff in a cell. It will show up with no space at the end.</td>
<td>
This stuff will have a space after it.
</td>
April 2nd, 2004 at 3:00 pm
That wasn't it - there was no extra space in the html after the TD and before the /TD tag… Basically like this:
<td><img etc. etc.></td>
April 2nd, 2004 at 3:25 pm
This behavior is actually correct acording to the W3C standards. There's an article on DevEdge describing the issue very well:
http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/img-table/
I believe this is also the reason the "Almost standard" mode was introduced in later Netscape and Mozilla builds:
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/quirks/doctypes.html
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/quirks/quirklist.html
April 2nd, 2004 at 3:37 pm
Excellent! Thanks for the links for the explanations. While I still think it's crazy that it did that - at least I know WHY now!
April 3rd, 2004 at 12:40 am
A List Apart also had a good explanation of doctypes: Fixing Your Site With the Right Doctype
April 5th, 2004 at 10:40 pm
You can alter Dreamweaver's default templates so you don't have to change the DTD every time you start a new file. In DMX 2004 the default templates are located in c:\PATH TO\Dreamweaver MX 2004\Configuration\DocumentTypes\NewDocuments. Edit "Default.html" to your liking and save.