I am building a webpage, and I found a problem which I cannot solve. If I declare the DOCTYPE, the page breaks completely, and if I don’t declare it, the IE version won’t work properly (the drop down menus won’t drop). But, despite of it’s broken, if I declare the DOCTYPE, the dropdown menus work at every explorer, including IE. So I really don’t know what to do, any idea? I’m currently declaring the DOCTYPE as: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> but I’ve tried other options and they don’t work neither.
Last time I posted here the free server blocked the page (probably too many users, as I’m the only one getting in currently), but these are 2 examples of the page:
with DOCTYPE: http://newfutureuniversity.org/project/
without DOCTYPE (dropdown menus not working with IE9):
http://newfutureuniversity.org/learn/
Any help would be appreciated. Even if it’s just to orientate me about where to start searching, as I could’t find anything similar.
Using or not using the doctype for modern web pages is no longer optional and is required. It is the very first thing that goes down on a page and never changes. If you created a page without one to begin with, then your whole page is set in quirks mode. Trying to fix it or change it by adding/removing the doctype is, essentially, changing the rules and the target as you go along.
Trying to use jQuery to fix this now is just sinking you into a deeper hole. Add the doctype, use a modern browser to get everything how you want it (IE is not a modern browser), then work on getting IE to follow along.
The charset you should be using is
<meta charset="utf-8">