WebBrowser in .NET 2.0: !DOCTYPE gets overwridden

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Joubert Nel - 23 Dec 2005 22:27 GMT

Hi,

I have an XHTML document that I wish to display to the user in the .NET 2.0 WebBrowser control, and allow the user to edit it.

I got everything working beautifully but noticed that the control tampers with the !DOCTYPE definition.
Here is the XHTML that I pass to the WebBrowser control:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>HtmlEditor</title>
<style type="text/css">
BODY {font-family:Tahoma; font-size:10pt; color:#000000; font-weight:400; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; MARGIN: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px}
</style>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

As you can see, this is simply a template, giving the user a blank slate where they can now edit.

However, after the above snippet is loaded by the WebBrowser (I use the .Document.OpenNew(); and then .Document.Write(".....") methods) the !DOCTYPE is changed to:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

Does anybody know why this is happening, what the potential effects are, and how I can resolve?

Thanks

Joubert

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Herfried K. Wagner [MVP] - 24 Dec 2005 11:05 GMT

"Joubert Nel" <j@j.com> schrieb:

>I have an XHTML document that I wish to display to the user
> in the .NET 2.0 WebBrowser control, and allow the user to edit it.
>
>I got everything working beautifully but noticed that the control
> tampers with the !DOCTYPE definition.

I believe the problem is that IE doesn't support XHTML and treats it as
HTML.

Signature

M S Herfried K. Wagner
M V P <URL:http://dotnet.mvps.org/>
V B <URL:http://classicvb.org/petition/>

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e_zverev - 17 Jan 2006 18:11 GMT

> I believe the problem is that IE doesn't support XHTML and treats it as
> HTML.

Don't believe this :) IE supports XHTML 1.1

The problem is that IE does not support a single character before the
DOCTYPE declaration. In your case this is "<?xml version="1.0"
encoding="utf-8"?>
" instruction that spoils the whole thing.

Remove everything before DOCTYPE, even a comment would be enough for IE to
get ignorant to your DOCTYPE.

THE question to MS guys is: why'o'why is this so...fragile?!

Oh man, I've spent an hour to find it out. It ran me nuts.

Signature

Eugene U. Zverev,
Senior Programmer

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Herfried K. Wagner [MVP] - 17 Jan 2006 18:27 GMT

"e_zverev" <ezverev@discussions.microsoft.com> schrieb:

>> I believe the problem is that IE doesn't support XHTML and treats it as
>> HTML.
> Don't believe this :) IE supports XHTML 1.1

Not really. It supports XHTML 1.0/1.1 if it is provided as 'text/html' and
treats it as normal HTML. However, XHTML 1.1 is not indended to be made
available as 'text/html'. 'application/xhtml+xml' should be used as content
type for XHTML 1.1 documents instead.

Signature

M S Herfried K. Wagner
M V P <URL:http://dotnet.mvps.org/>
V B <URL:http://classicvb.org/petition/>

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Joubert Nel - 17 Jan 2006 20:28 GMT

Hello Eugene,

Some feedback inline.

Thanks
Joubert

>> I believe the problem is that IE doesn't support XHTML and treats it as
>> HTML.
> Don't believe this :) IE supports XHTML 1.1

From what I can gather on both MS and other sites (for example
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/15/467901.aspx) this is not the
case.

For example, try to actually load XHTML into IE and then do a View Source.
Note the changes it makes

> The problem is that IE does not support a single character before the
> DOCTYPE declaration. In your case this is "<?xml version="1.0"
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
>
> Oh man, I've spent an hour to find it out. It ran me nuts.

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WebBrowser in .NET 2.0: !DOCTYPE gets overwridden

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