Okay, are you working in a
designer like Dreamweaver or Frontpage (*shudder*) or an editor such as phpDesignerPro? The designers will rewrite anything you write, which is why I gave up on Dreamweaver MX, and it won't really matter what you do.
If you'd like some examples
see this site, as they've free templates. Nothing against learning from someone else's tested work.
And a full XHTML Transitional template, courtesy of webstandards.org, is:
HTML Code:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Conforming XHTML 1.0 Transitional Template</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Note the second line. I've found it to be important at times.
If I have time this afternoon I will make you an example. If not, someone else may have to show you working code. I threw one together just yesterday that worked, the exact manner I described, so I know it can be done.