Tag Archives: doctype

jQuery: Change Doctype

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There are a few things you might want to know if you’re looking to change the document type (doctype) using jQuery or Javascript. First, doctype is listed as a property in the W3C documentation, and is defined as read-only: interface Document : Node { readonly attribute DocumentType doctype; readonly attribute DOMImplementation implementation; readonly attribute Element documentElement; Element createElement(in DOMString tagName) raises(DOMException); DocumentFragment createDocumentFragment(); While it may be possible to insert a doctype with javascript / jquery above the HTML tag, it is not advisable to do so. Sample code which would do this might look like: <!– no doctype, loads in Quirks Mode (BackCompat) –> <html> <!– rest of the document, then at the end: –> <script> alert(‘now in compatMode ‘+document.compatMode); if (document.compatMode===’BackCompat’) { setTimeout(function() { var markup= document.documentElement.innerHTML; markup= ‘< !DOCTYPE html><html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” lang=”en” xml:lang=”en”>’+markup+'</html>’; document.open(); document.write(markup); document.close(); }, 0); } </script> </html> via

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