doctype (W3C DOM Core property)
| Version | Depr. | Static | Read-only |
|---|---|---|---|
| DOM1 | No | No | Yes |
| IE5.5+ | FF3+ | SA1.3+ | OP9+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buggy | Buggy | Buggy | Buggy |
Example
var dtd = document.doctype;
In the example above, the dtd variable is a reference
to the Document Type Declaration for this document, which is an instance
of the DocumentType interface, containing
properties such as the name and publicId. So in this next example:
var pubid = dtd.publicId;If we were on a page
with an XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype, the pubid variable
would have the value -//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN.
Description
The Document Type Declaration
of an XML document. For HTML documents, or XML documents without a
document type declaration, this property should return
null.
This property is readonly.
Compatibility
| Internet Explorer | Firefox | Safari | Opera | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.5 | 6.0 | 7.0 | 1.5 | 2.0 | 3.0 | 1.3 | 2.0 | 3.0 | 9.0 | 9.5 |
| Buggy | Buggy | Buggy | Partial | Partial | Buggy | Buggy | Buggy | Buggy | Buggy | Buggy |
And if you're lucky, you'll never need this!
In Internet Explorer 6 and 7
and Safari 1.3 and 2 in HTML mode1, the
doctype property returns null.
However this is according to specification — the
doctype should only return an object in XML
(including XHTML mode2), otherwise it should be
null.
In Safari 1.3 and 2 in XHTML
mode or XML the doctype property is
available, but all its properties are null.
In
Firefox 3 in HTML mode the name of a doctype
is returned in uppercase.
Internet Explorer 5.5 in
HTML does not implement this interface
(doctype is undefined).
Internet Explorer in XML does not
implement the internalSubset, publicId or systemId properties (they return undefined).
The relationship between the DocumentType
node and its owning Document varies between
browsers. While all which implement this interface have the correct ownerDocument, only
Firefox has the document as its parentNode; in Opera and Safari
3 both properties are null.
Firefox has the correct behavior.
Only
Opera in XHTML mode or XML and
Internet Explorer in XML return a populated
entities collection; in
Safari and Firefox
it's null. In Internet Explorer in
XML this collection only includes internal entities (those
defined in a doctype's internal subset).
Only Opera in
XHTML mode and Firefox in XHTML mode or
XML provide data for the internalSubset property; in
Safari it's null, in
Internet Explorer it's undefined, and in other
browsers and modes it's an empty string.
User-contributed notes
There are no comments yet.
Add a note
To post a note on this topic, please log in with your SitePoint username and password. If you don't have an account yet, you can create a new account for free.