Just wondering why w3.org is on every webpage source.

[Dingo_Dog]

Does anyone know why the following is on most page sources. Does w3.org own the internet? And then when I used Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, it automatically shows the following or something similar. Most of the time it has w3.org somewhere.

"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Might be a stupid question, and I'm sure no one notices it, but a bit of trivia.

So why?

[Grizzly]

It tells the browser which version of HTML/XHTML you are using.you are using.

[Extasey]

Huh, I assumed it was some sort of webpage registration thing... like when you register your domain...

Haha, I was way off!

[MattR]

I don't think they own it as such but they set the standards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium

You need the code you posted above so it knows what version of HTML/XHTML you're using so it can check if it's valid (if you choose to validate your code).

[Extasey]

Haha, what standards do they set?

I can find anything I want on the internets!

[MattR]

The HTML/XHTML/CSS etc standards. What's valid code, what isn't.

[Sendaii]

I don't think they own it as such but they set the standards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium

You need the code you posted above so it knows what version of HTML/XHTML you're using so it can check if it's valid (if you choose to validate your code).

Validating your code isn't essential. Just make sure that it works in most browsers. Hell, AFAIK, even Google doesn't validate it's code.

[Omniscient]

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) are the people that set the standards for markup language and browser compatibility.

It's not required to have a doctype but it's certainly encouraged. Browsers normally render just fine without it. However what happens is that if you have new markup like xhtml strict and you don't define it on your site with a doctype then you run the risk of the browser misinterpreting the rendering of the page.

I always encourage everyone to validate their website.
http://validator.w3.org/

Right now W3C is working on creating the newest standards (html 2.0).

[Headshot]

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) are the people that set the standards for markup language and browser compatibility.

It's not required to have a doctype but it's certainly encouraged. Browsers normally render just fine without it. However what happens is that if you have new markup like xhtml strict and you don't define it on your site with a doctype then you run the risk of the browser misinterpreting the rendering of the page.

I always encourage everyone to validate their website.
http://validator.w3.org/

Right now W3C is working on creating the newest standards (html 2.0).

Epic.