The Importance of DOCTYPE
I learned something today while trying to figure out why the new design for backstreet was behaving so badly in IE6. Finally, I narrowed it down to one thing, the < !DOCTYPE> document identifier was not the first line of the file. Instead, I had flippantly placed an HTML comment in the first line, not realizing that it could cause problems. Sure enough, as soon as I removed that comment, everything in IE was a smooth as apple pie?
So if you are going to be a good web developer, and use modern web standard xhtml in your pages, remember that the doctype declaration must be at the top!
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">