Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

A short time ago, Anne van Kesteren and our own Molly Holzschlag had a brief back-and-forth regarding DOCTYPEs.

Anne makes the point that whatever DOCTYPE you use, all browsers will treat your markup as ‘tag soup’ (aka HTML) unless you send it with the correct MIME Type. That is, it’s the MIME Type, not the DOCTYPE, that matters when it domes to determining whether a browser will treat a page as XHTML or HTML.

For her part, Molly notes that while an XHTML DOCTYPE may not kick browsers into strict XML mode, it does have an effect — sometimes a dramatic one — on how browsers render pages.

Both posts make excellent points, and are well worth a moment if you missed them when they were new.

Your Replies

#1 On March 19th, 2006 5:33 pm Quirks mode - bza.no replied:

[...] Det er DOCTYPE som avgjør hvilken modus nettleseren går i. Enkelte har diskutert før om DOCTYPE egentlig betyr noe, men i denne sammenhengen gjør det helt klart det. De fleste doctypene utløser “standard mode” eller “almost standard mode”. Men enkelte utløser “quirks mode”. I tillegg finnes det enkelte andre metode for å kjøre nettsiden i “quirks mode”. [...]

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