The feature was added in mid-code-stream as an alternative to a very dangerous hack that was being used and promulgated through the community. A switch value in the Notes.ini is relatively easy to implement, since the doctype statement is just a text constant added to the top (without a great deal of computatin') by the Domino web engine -- switch the cached value on server start-up, and the new value is put in place of the old on all subsequent pages. Yes, it is a bit "dangerous" to badly-written applications, but not nearly as dangerous as going to HTML 4.01 in the first place -- a HUGE number of applications were written on R5 that were just barely legal in HTML 3.2 (and that's saying a lot, since HTML 3.2 was not a prescriptive standard so much as a description of what people were doing at the time).
I'm not in a position to know for sure, but it looks like the doctype *may* be database- or page-settable in the next server release (post 7.0.x). That supposition is based on mini-polls in the developerWorks fora thrown out there by some Lotus developers. The slant was towards XHTML, but the only way to make XHTML a realistic possibility in Domino (as opposed to hand-crafted hacks) without destroying existing applications is to make the doctype settings and output switches more "local" than they are now.
The feature was added in mid-code-stream as an alternative to a very dangerous hack that was being used and promulgated through the community. A switch value in the Notes.ini is relatively easy to implement, since the doctype statement is just a text constant added to the top (without a great deal of computatin') by the Domino web engine -- switch the cached value on server start-up, and the new value is put in place of the old on all subsequent pages. Yes, it is a bit "dangerous" to badly-written applications, but not nearly as dangerous as going to HTML 4.01 in the first place -- a HUGE number of applications were written on R5 that were just barely legal in HTML 3.2 (and that's saying a lot, since HTML 3.2 was not a prescriptive standard so much as a description of what people were doing at the time).
I'm not in a position to know for sure, but it looks like the doctype *may* be database- or page-settable in the next server release (post 7.0.x). That supposition is based on mini-polls in the developerWorks fora thrown out there by some Lotus developers. The slant was towards XHTML, but the only way to make XHTML a realistic possibility in Domino (as opposed to hand-crafted hacks) without destroying existing applications is to make the doctype settings and output switches more "local" than they are now.