The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

Transitional Doctypes are stupid

Posted on July 3, 2007.

The purpose of the transitional version is to be able to support features for older browsers that do not understand stylesheets (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/#xhtml1). It’s purpose is not to allow web developers to use features that aren’t supported in Strict. If you support XHTML, why only go half way? You might as well just stick with HTML 4.01.

— Jonathan Snook commenting on Clagnut

From what I have read about DOCTYPEs, the purpose of a Transitional doctype (as opposed to Strict or Frameset, regardless of HTML version) is for temporary use in the process of converting web documents from an older version to a newer one (say, from HTML 3.2 to HTML 4.0). It includes elements and attributes that are deprecated in the current HTML version… so, XHTML 1.0 Transitional includes elements from HTML 4.01 and 4.0 which have been deprecated in XHTML 1.0 Strict. Doesn't this sound like a great idea?

Well, it's not.

The problem with transitional doctypes is not the principle behind them. The problem is the way they are used by the web design community. In my two years of tracking web design discussion lists, forums, and blogs, I have never heard someone say, "I/we/our company converted all of our documents to XYZ Transitional and a few months later, converted them to XYZ Strict. God bless that intermediate step." What I have heard, 100% of the time, is a lot more like, "if you want to use XYZ version 2 but you insist on using an element from XYZ version 1, just use XYZ 2 Transitional. Then you can say you use XYZ 2 anyway!" For example, I have heard people who insist on using XHTML 1.0 in their pages but are disappointed when they discover that the "target=_blank" attribute from HTML 4.0 is deprecated in XHTML 1.0 Strict, so what they tend to end up doing is using XHTML 1.0 Transitional and calling it a day. This is not a temporary solution, this is their final solution for marking up web documents.

It results in a lot of web sites, content management solutions, and web applications using Transitional Doctypes rather than Strict in order to be liberal about the markup they support (Wordpress, for example, uses XHTML 1.0 Transitional in its default theme). There's no point to this; if you are going to use a certain version of HTML, you should support that version in earnest. Otherwise, use an earlier version. It's that simple. If developers and designers don't do this, then there must be a problem with that version of HTML, since the people using it can't do without the deprecated tags. Or, it could mean that there are a lot of bad or uneducated developers out there. Either way, it's a sad situation when Transitional doctypes are used the wrong way.

This is why I believe that Transitional doctypes shouldn't even exist. It shouldn't be that difficult to convert from one version of HTML to the next without a Transitional doctype. It would be just as well if all the future versions and recommendations of (x)HTML just didn't have them.

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7 Comments

1. Jermayn Parker on July 3, 2007

   I totally agree. I recently read some place that for WP websites it is easier and better to use transitional but for everything else I would suggest STRICT.

   I have also posted my thoughts on this as well hear:
   http://germworks.net/blog/2007/02/23/different-doctypes-and-do-they-matter-for-standards

2. BillyG on July 3, 2007

   Call me guilty, I guess being raised in the WP environment molded a lot of us that way. Point taken, thanks.

3. Christian Montoya on July 3, 2007

   Hey, don't take my post as reprimanding web designers & developers; I can't blame any one for using Transitional doctypes as long as they exist. My point here is to say that the W3C shouldn't have them. And as far as I can tell, future versions of (x)HTML probably won't.

4. BillyG on July 3, 2007

   Gotcha.

5. Jem on July 8, 2007

   I always consider the transitional doctypes to be the pussies way out :p

6. BT on December 1, 2008

   All doc types are stupid. Unless you need some weird functionality you get with an off-brand doc type, they should be omitted as a waste of space.

7. Christian Montoya on December 2, 2008

   BT, would standards-compliant rendering be "weird functionality?"