Web Sites made Easy

Doctypes are used by browsers to determine if the website should be shown in standards or quirks mode. Older web pages that do not have doctypes are ran in a quirks mode which means the author designed special hacks to make the webpage work the same in different browsers. This was designed to let future coders write with doctypes while allowing older webpages, which were around before doctypes, to still run on a quirks mode and not destroy the content of the older page. Coders may use strict, transitional, or frameset doctypes to write in. HTML Strict does not allow any deprecated tags. This is placed before any code in your website, even before the html tag. For a full list of doctypes please click here. If you are writing in XHTML a declaration is required. A declaration is not required if you are writing in HTML.

Filed under: HTML Basics (learn HTML) by Zach