What is the purpose of the following? Thanks. <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
It is useful on a technicality for most people. It triggers IE's standards mode and can often help display properly coded web sites in a better manner. For most people, it is just something to add to pass the W3 validator and claim their site is valid. It will be useful later on when we see an increase in the use of XML and web services, where web pages will be true XHTML and can be parsed easily be machines to get the data that is needed. Though frankly, I don't see much point and would rather use XML that is transformed into a web page with XSLT or two separate forms, somewhat similar to what is seen on web sites with RSS feeds. Sorry if I confused you further...
I've wanted to know what the EN meant... I hope it doesn't mean English. What most people know or care about it is that it's a valid doctype telling the browsers what kind of page this is coded in, and thus how to render it. It tells the browser that the page is using HTML4 tags, and that it may have some older, deprecated tags as well (the "transistional" part). Then the example page at www.w3c.org shows the browser a comparison which in this case is "loose." You may also see this: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> which tells the browser not to use "quirks" mode (used for older web pages written in older/deprecated code) but instead to use "standards" mode. The strict tells the browser not to display the page if the XHTML is not correctly written... though some browsers still try to display the page. The point was that browsers were to take an all-or-nothing approach, so that instead of half-rendering a page, it either renders (correctly) or does not display at all. Some browser-makers don't follow that guideline. The XHTML also is supposed to make the page be able to use xml... dunno if anyone does this though. And the example page for the browser in this case is "strict". I'm probably not 100% correct about all this, but this is my understanding. I've only used the XHTML strict 1.0, so I'm not terribly familiar with transitional and loose.
I dont believe it is English as I have not seen a single website that uses anything other than EN including the french version of W3C (which you would imagine would be correct if anyone was) - what it does stand for I am not sure, end?
Its the language of the DTD itself (not the language of the content on the page, hence why the French W3 site uses EN in the doctype too)