I’m working on a site design, and I’m a XHTML 1.0 Strict user - I live by it.  However, my CSS file went unrecognized as long as I left the doctype set as XHTML 1.0 Strict.  When I took it out, the CSS file was recognized - but all of my positioning was thrown off (probably because pMachine goes transitional - as far as I can tell anyway - the site now looks like what it would if I used transitional, so I’m assuming that’s what’s going on)

Is there any way I can get pMachine Pro to allow me to set my doctype to XHTML 1.0 Strict?  I’ve been searching for an answer for this (and apparently Zeldman once used pMachine Pro, but he had to hack it to get it to recognize his Strict setting) - but I can’t find anything anywhere on the subject, except that pMachine doesn’t play nice with Strict.

Any ideas?  Anyone?

It’s quite possible that some of the HTML output by pMachine Pro is Transitional and not Strict, but there certainly shouldn’t be anything stopping you from putting in whatever DOCTYPE you want.  That’s just text after all—the page may not actually validate as what you specify, but there shouldn’t be anything stopping you from specifying it.

That’s what I thought - but it is stopping me.  If I put that doctype in there, my stylesheet “disappears”.  (Not that it disappears from the server, it just acts like it’s not there at all.)  If I remove the doctype, my stylesheet it recognized, but it treats everything as transitional.  So I have no idea what to do - I really need it to be strict.

That behavior sounds like a browser issue, not anything to do with pMachine Pro.  Do you get the same behavior on different browsers?  How about a link?

Click here.

Same behavior in all browsers I have.  You’ll see it now with the strict doctype set.

Typically, I design in Firefox, since it’s the most standards-compliant out there.  I’ve found that once it’s all up and functioning in Firefox, is just a few simple hacks to get it working in other browsers in the same way - rather than, say, designing in IE and trying to hack it all up (and spending countless hours and sometimes days to do so) to make it work in other browsers.

I also finally found something else on the issue - a mention on this thread, most of the posts are by a Mike Essl.  I didn’t get a chance this morning to really look into it, but I have a few minutes now and am going to try it again.

Scratch that - I just reloaded and saw it’s now working in IE, but not Firefox.  Took longer for everything to load, for some reason….

This is just weird.

Got it!

I validated everything I had, and came across a problem in the stylesheet.  The stylesheet validated when I checked it from my hard drive, but when I checked it form the server, it came up with an error.

Turns out my server isn’t seeing .css extensions properly - it creates an error. (Understandlable, since this is a client who actually has his own server, and I had to tell him what to install on it since he usually doesn’t do websites)

So, basically, I have to call my client’s tech guy and tell him to set it so that the server views .css extensions as text - then it should work.