₦airaland Forum

Am creating my first website and I realise that my css codes don't work properly when I include a doctype declaration to the html page.

Don't know what the problem is, the css works fine but the doctype changes everything.

And also need help on the specific css codes to use for crossbrowser compatibility.

A brother needs help, thanks.

Am not sure what you really mean. Css has nothing to do with doctype. Doctype is strictly for html. Maybe, you are missing out something that relates to your stylesheet. Instead of using html4 doctype that has lots of confusing and cluttered details, you can start using html5 doctype, which is short and clean. And one good thing about html5 doctype is that you can still declare it and still use old html4 tags and elements and you will still be good to go.

Add these lines of codes at the beginning of your html document.

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
</head>

What do you mean by browser compatibility? If you are using html4 and css2, then you should not worry yourself about browser compatibility because even ie7 understands all the html4 and css2 properties and values.

But if you are using html5 and css3, then you should first know about browser prefix when using most css3 properties. But since you are starting out, I advice you focus on html4 and css2. There are certain workarounds in getting html5 elements to be rendered well across browsers which you may not need to bother yourself with for now.

You should likewise compare your header code with what @graphicplus has posted. If your css is not working at all, then you might be missing a closing tag.

For example if you declare an html4 doctype

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

you should check the closing ">. If it's not there, that might affect your other heading tags.