Is the placement of <!DOCTYPE vital?

**Krieger** · Mar 16, 2004 23:06

Hello.

I'm using a template from Paul O'Brien (see CSS forum), but have a question about the

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

statement at the top of the page (and many other webpages as well).

If I place that statement before my <html> tag, the page (which normally fits 100% of the viewscreen) will scroll just a tiny bit - no matter what I change.

If I put the <!DOCTYPE... statement AFTER the <html> tag is stops the scrolling.

Is the placement order of the statement in any way vital?

Can someone direct me to a good resource for the purpose of the <!DOCTYPE... statement?

Any input would be appreciated.