I'm working on a website that uses PHP (with Savant templating for MVC) on the backend and HTML4 and CSS3 on the front end. I've used some font-embedding and transparency. The doctype I'm using for the site is as follows:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
But then, here's what happens. Hell breaks loose. My font size diminished to around 1em everywhere and the padding turns 0px. I don't understand why this happens.
Further, as I've embedded two fonts, one of them works fine with size and style but the other font is totally lost on IE. It shows up in Times New Roman with a 1m font-size.
If anyone knows the solution to this, I kindly request you to help me with the same. Thanks. :)
If I understand you right, you added the doctype after you did all your css coding.
If that's right, then it was a bad idea in the first place to not include a doctype. The doctype definition insures that the browser does not render in quirks mode. In quirks mode every browser applies completely different default style rules and has a quite different rendering behavior.
Applying a doctype and let the browser use standard mode is good practice, because it reduces the differences between browsers - there are still more left, than you would like to cope with on a daily basis.