Domino 6.5.3 - DominoCompleteDoctype - Be careful what you wish for.

When I did read about Domino's fix for the incomplete doctype on the:gutted:geek I was itching to test it. After upgrading the server to 6.5.3 I activated DominoCompleteDoctype=1 (you can use 1 for HTML 401 transitional and 2 for HTML 401 strict) only to see most of my web databases fail: CSS rendering was gone and JavaScript didn't load. Among the applications fail also was Blogsphere, the template this Blog is build on.
We had a public holiday yesterday (the Hindu Depavali, it has clear advantages to live in a multi cultural environment, Monday Hari Raja holiday follows), so I got some breathing space to investigate. It turned out it was a case of old R5 work around and subsequential "Chin Chai" work (sloppiness). Before R6 we used to put JavaScript and CSS in pages and forms. And since you can twist and tweak JS/CSS with @formula in a form/page I often keep them there (one of my favourite tricks: generate JavaScript out of the document I am viewing using a special view and a form formula, makes design much less cluttered). Domino delivers them as mimetype text/html.
As long as browsers run in Quirks mode it doesn't matter. The very moment you force them into standard mode all of them get picky about the mime types. So you need to change the mime type in your forms/pages that contain only css/js to "text/css" or "text/javascript". Luckily Domino allows you to do so on the form/page properties.
There is another catch: In standard mode CSS now seems to be case sensitive. class="rightcolumn" would not match .RightColumn { } anymore. (Now I would wish for a tool that shows case mismatches in CSS vs. HTML). You need to fix you html or css.
So happy testing of your web applications!