Always Use a Doctype

After spending an hour on something that should have taken me 20 minutes – I wanted to pass on something I should have caught right away. The problem: you use CSS to lay something out and it looks great in Firefox and Safari – but not in IE. At this point I validate the CSS to make sure I did not forget a bracket or something stupid. Next step – validate the XHTML. This is where I would have solved my problem, but I failed to take this step. At that point I would have seen that the script I was working with did not have a doctype defined. Once I added in the doctype – everything loaded as expected and I could not believe I missed something so basic. Lesson learned – and hopefully you will know now as well to make sure a doctype is always set.