That you should. Here is an example of a webpage first lines of code:
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
< html xml:lang="en" lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
< head>
< meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />[/CODE]
In this I have set the doctype to be XHTML transitional, which is what I recommend if you are putting tables in your design, but want to be as much up to standards as possible. If you get frustrated with the weird errors and want a more loose doctype you can use html 4.01 transitional instead.
After doctype I add a declaration of language which makes it easier for searchengines to know where to put the website and how to interpret it.
After that I set a charset, which in this case uses the european charset as I will have swedish characters on the website. For strict english website you should use UTF-8 instead.[CODE]< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
< html xml:lang="en" lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
< head>
< meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />[/CODE]
In this I have set the doctype to be XHTML transitional, which is what I recommend if you are putting tables in your design, but want to be as much up to standards as possible. If you get frustrated with the weird errors and want a more loose doctype you can use html 4.01 transitional instead.
After doctype I add a declaration of language which makes it easier for searchengines to know where to put the website and how to interpret it.
After that I set a charset, which in this case uses the european charset as I will have swedish characters on the website. For strict english website you should use UTF-8 instead.