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Posted by Neredbojias on 03/08/07 08:11
On Tue, 06 Mar 2007 08:14:20 GMT Jukka K. Korpela scribed:
> Scripsit Neredbojias:
>
>> Actually, I wonder if it displays "correctly" in any browser without
>> a doctype.
>
> Without a document type declaration, an HTML document is not correct
> (technically, not an HTML document at all), so strictly speaking, the
> concept of correct rendering is meaningless.
>
> On the other hand, browsers use document type declarations _only_ as
> magic strings in selecting between two (or sometimes three) rendering
> modes, a broken one (called "standards mode") or a _very_ broken one
> (called "quirks mode"). Omitting a document type declaration is a sure
> way of putting the browser into the very broken one. But you can't
> make things worse than that.
>
> In fact, merely adding a correct document type declaration into a
> document that otherwise grossly violates HTML and CSS specifications
> would very probably make things _worse_.
True, but I think the idea is that the doctype declaration provides a more
appropriate structure for determining what is correct or not. Naturally,
it still is up to the browser to interpret and act upon such information
though most browsers do seem to perform better with a proper declaration.
I guess this could be viewed as a situation of "identifying mistakes
correctly" or at least more properly in an optimistic sense.
--
Neredbojias
He who laughs last sounds like an idiot.
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