Which doctypes are being used?

July 12, 2007 in web design | 3 comments

In trying to decide which doctype to use for my new web apps, I thought I’d see what other sites are currently using. Here are the results in order from least to most leading edge:

No doctype at all

  • mail.google.com
  • mail.yahoo.com
  • www.alexa.com
  • www.amazon.com
  • www.barnesnoble.com
  • www.ebay.com
  • www.godaddy.com
  • www.google.com
  • www.myspace.com
  • www.trianglemls.com

HTML 4.0 Transitional w/o URL

  • www.fedex.com

HTML 4.0 Transitional Loose

  • www.dell.com
  • www.microsoft.com
  • www.monster.com

HTML 4.0 Strict w/o URL

  • www.ask.com

HTML 4.01 Transitional w/o URL

  • www.bankofamerica.com
  • www.netflix.com
  • www.nuskin.com
  • www.ups.com

HTML 4.01 Transitional Loose

  • www.apple.com
  • www.bizbuysell.com
  • www.craigslist.org
  • www.hp.com
  • www.sun.com
  • www.usps.gov
  • www.youtube.com

HTML 4.01 Strict

  • www.flickr.com
  • www.slashdot.org
  • www.walmart.com
  • www.yahoo.com (for Firefox, no doctype for IE)

XHTML 1.0 Transitional

  • www.aol.com
  • www.digg.com
  • www.expedia.com
  • www.livejournal.com
  • www.loopnet.com
  • www.orbitz.com
  • www.stumbleupon.com
  • www.wachovia.com

XHTML 1.0 Strict

  • del.icio.us
  • maps.google.com
  • www.blogger.com
  • www.facebook.com
  • www.ibm.com
  • www.jaiku.com
  • www.msn.com
  • www.pownce.com
  • www.twitter.com
  • www.wikipedia.org

XHTML 1.1

  • www.mayoclinic.com

Conclusion

There are enough mainstream sites using XHTML now, that I feel it may be ready for prime time. Since I don’t have a lot of legacy pages to deal with, I’m going to use XHTML 1.0 Strict.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

Tags: ,

  1. Brian Adkins’s avatar

    Brian Adkins on July 13, 2007 at 4:40 pm

    Bummer, just ran into my first problem with XHTML Strict. You can’t use a target attribute on an anchor element :(

  2. Jim’s avatar

    Jim on July 14, 2007 at 8:36 am

    Brian, Matt Promise sent me a link to your site here.

    Use this:

  3. Jim’s avatar

    Jim on July 14, 2007 at 8:37 am

    Well, it didnt show my code. Lets try again.
    \
    \

    \