How do I use a DOCTYPE that validate?

Question

I am trying to troubleshoot some issues on a website that is going live today and I keep getting this funny error in Firebug and on the W3C validation site

Here is my DOCTYPE code

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

Here is the error I get:

syntax error [Break On This Error] < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHT.../xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Any guidance on this seemingly simple task would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Did some “s sneak in there instead of straight double quotes? What's the character encoding of the document? Is there any white space or text output before your DOCTYPE declaration? — 65Fbef05
I really don't want to invest time in building a test case to see if I'm interpreting your error messages correctly (hint: Provide a working test case!), but that looks like Firefox is getting a 404 error page for a <script src> URI but not with a 404 status code, so it is trying to treat an HTML document as JS. That has nothing to do with validation. — Quentin

red-X red-X · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-20T14:40:11

Seems you have the same problem here: http://blog.ryanrampersad.com/2008/09/06/syntax-error-break-on-this-error-doctype-html-public-w3cdtd-xhtml3orgtr-xhtml1-dtd-xhtml1-strictdtd/

check your script tags!

the following gives the same result:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript" src=""></script>
</head>

<body>

</body>
</html>

How do I use a DOCTYPE that validate?

1 Answers