Why do we need doctypes

Course Price View Course. Free Software Development Course. Login details for this Free course will be emailed to you. Email ID. Contact No. This HTML doctype declaration also contains all elements and attributes, but no presentational and deprecated elements.

However, it must be written in strict XML :. Learn to use HTML tag here! Code has been added to clipboard! Reading time 3 min. Contents 1. All browser vendors and web developers should adhere to these standards. This would ensure that websites would render well across browsers. The changes required by the standards were quite different from some existing practices.

Adhering to them would break existing non standards compliant websites. To handle this problem, vendors began programming rendering modes in to their browsers. Web developers would need to add a doctype declaration to the top of an HTML document. The doctype declaration would tell the browser which rendering mode to use for that document. In the modern age of HTML5, web standards are fully implemented in all major browsers.

Learn more. Why do I need a doctype? What does it do [duplicate] Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 5 months ago.

Active 10 years, 5 months ago. Viewed 87k times. Improve this question. Community Bot 1 1 1 silver badge. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Kevin Peno Kevin Peno 8, 1 1 gold badge 32 32 silver badges 55 55 bronze badges. Actually, it does determine whether a document is rendered as strict mode, almost strict mode, or quirks mode, so it does serve a purpose.

See this table: hsivonen. The Doctype does two things. It identifies which dialect of HTML you're using. It controls whether the browsers uses "standards" or "quirks" mode to render the document.