I just did a quick Google Search and a lot of the articles that I read describe transitional type is when you are converting legacy websites. They say strict is the default and what should be used.

How that relates to Concrete5 I am not sure, but most of the articles seemed to say that Strict is the default for new work.

Pulled this from a site:
The names reveal what they are about: Transitional DOCTYPEs are meant for those making the transition from older markup to modern ways. Strict DOCTYPEs are actually the default – the way HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 were constructed to be used.

I just don't know if there's something in Concrete that's going to break validation for strict, or look funny...

I'm not saying transitional is better and I like starting with something strict but if things like a simple link that opens in a new window don't work anymore, I get annoyed a bit..

Why are you (and others) saying that strict is "better"?

Within a cms like concrete5 it actually gets invalid as soon as you add a few (not so fancy) things into tinymce. Transitional is a bit easier about that!

I honestly just didn't think to check when I was starting the template. Now that I've realized that I should have checked it when starting out, I'm just wondering if it really does matter.

For now I'm just sticking with transitional, but I don't know if it will look different in some browsers because I'm making the change at this point in the game...

I just read some posts about strict being the default value but no one mentions good reasons against transitional..

As long as I can't add link with target="_blank" I keep using transitional

I'm usually using transitional because strict seems to have a problem with link that contain target="_blank"...

No one ever told me I shouldn't use transitional. If strict works - okay.. If not go for transitional.

I had quite a few customers that complained about the fact that their site isn't "valid", no one mentioned transitional nor strict..

Strict mode has no "problem" with target attributes...it's just deprecated, so it doesn't work! If you still in need of that attributes like target or a tag like iframe it's necessary to use transitional. Plus the DOCTYPE can cause a very different behaviour on how the browser renders your code (also depending on how you have it constructed). Choosing strict mode whipes off propretary legacy code and concentrates on a clean an syntactically method. This requires a different and purified method of how to build a page wich is in most cases not matching the desires of customers. At least there is no good or bad, it's just a question of your needs :)

i agree that transitional is still usually the way to go unless you don't need any deprecated markup. more importantly, making sure you're encoded as utf-8 in your content-type as opposed to iso-8859 is important to let you use a wider range of characters.