Hello folks! I've been lurking the last 200 messages or so (i.e. 10-15
minutes ;-) I've already learned a lot, including that this list will be
well worth the bandwidth. I hope my post will be worth the reading.
I think I have my first contribution to make, and at the same time would
like to ask for suggestions/corrections/etc. I recently started using PHP
at my personal site (www.tntluoma.com) after reading Core PHP PRogramming
and mySQL/PHP Database Applications this past weekend.
I wish I had known about it sooner! I had already manually (well, using
global search/replace in UltraEdit) changed my site from HTML4 to
HTML4-Strict to XHTML1. That was fun (NOT!)
Then I realized that some of my pages were in HTML4 strict, some in loose,
some XHTML-Strict, some XHTML-Loose, and even a few XHTML 1.1 for good
measure. Before PHP, I had tried using SSI for defining DOCTYPEs, but
then it wouldn't validate anymore :-/ Then there were some of the pages
that validated, but the W3.org icon on the bottom of the page hadn't been
updated when I changed the DOCTYPE, so I had to go back again and work to
fix that. This was != HOURS OF FUN (and I won't even mention having to
then go back and make the DOCTYPE the first line to get IE6 to go into
standards mode).
Now that I'm using PHP (which is a TON faster than SSI on my site at
least) I have achieved what I think is a pretty excellent situation. I
have:
- an index.php that builds the page, calling external global files
that define doctype, global meta tags, etc as well as a set of bottom
navigational links and the W3 icons for (X)HTML and CSS validation
- a body.html that holds the main text of the page
- a header.html (optional) that includes local meta tags or CSS
for just that page
- a footer.html (optional) that adds any navigational information
for that directory
Ok, so thanks for reading all that. I have created this:
http://www.tntluoma.com/php/snippets/set-doctype.txt
The code there looks for a variable $DOCTYPE and then sets the
DOCTYPE, the W3 image for validating, and a 'friendly name' which we can
use in ALT tags, etc. For example
elseif ($DOCTYPE == "xhtml11")
{
//XHTML 1.1
$DOCTYPE_NAME="XHTML 1.1";
$DOCTYPE_ICON='/global/xhtml/1.1/valid.gif';
$DOCTYPE='<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd";><html
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"; xml:lang="en">';
}
There is an 'else' to handle cases when no DOCTYPE is defined.
This will make it easy to define DOCTYPEs for specific pages that
need/want them, and if you want to change the XHTML doctype for IE6 or to
go with the full XML definition.
Anyway, sorry for the long post. I hope this is helpful to
someone else. Comments/suggestions welcomed.
TjL
--
Site: www.tntluoma.com mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Info: Apache/1.3.19 (Unix) with PHP/4.0.6
How does your webhost provider measure up to UCVHost?
See http://www.peak.org/~luomat/misc/tntluoma-uptime/
--
PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
