HTML5 SoundCloud, doctypes, IE9

HTML & CSS
1

Hi

I’m using the Soundcloud HTML 5 plugin on my site. It is a bit temperamental on IE9. On some computers the play button doesn’t work, on some it doesn’t display at all, and on some it is fine.

My Doctype is

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Which was automatically set in Dreamweaver. DO I need to change to the HTML doctype, and if I do, will this affect anything else in my site, or the site’s functionality in IE7 and 8?

(I’m using the Soundcloud Flash plugin on IE7 and 8. This is throwing quite a few “There is no attribute…” errors in Dreamweaver but seems to be working)

Thanks

2

You can certainly switch to the HTML5 doctype, and it shouldn’t cause any problems. Though it probably also won’t fix your button problem, either.

3

Any doctype will do the job and keep browsers standard. It’s an issue though, using a transitional doctype, because you are essentially telling the browser that your page is in transition mode from years and years ago. And unless you are serving a mime type for text/xhtml, you aren’t using TRUE XHTML, more like fake XHTML. If you were to be using XHTML, and serving the mime type, IE wouldn’t be playing along and even showing the website.

You should really be using a HTML4.01 Strict doctype (for the reasons in the above paragraph).

As Ralph said, it won’t FIX your problems, but changing your doctype (although a few validation errors may go away/come due to the change).

Are you viewing the page in dreamweaver? Or I assume online on a web browser. Is it different browsers not displaying hte button?