Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 03/06/07 08:14

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_.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Back to original message]