DOCTYPE switch and web design

A lot of people don’t know that the DOCTYPE switch in your web page can have a profound impact on how your page layout works. For example, the CSS Box Model will look different in WinIE 6 depending on the DOCTYPE switch. If you are doing web design today, make sure the browser you are targeting is not rendering in quirk mode.

Here is a great table of all the different effects DOCTYPE switch has on some different browsers.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    Good info. I always assumed Trident renders HTML the same, DOCTYPE or not.

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2004
    Just had to think of it this morning:

    Assuming a proper DOCTYPE makes IE render standards-compliant (as claimed on the site you linked the table from), I take it that most people complaining about IE being non-standard et al are using DOCTYPEs in their code that make the browser run in quirk mode?

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2004
    Yes, that has been my experience.

    I spent a lot of time working on a standards compliant theme for dasBlog. Not having IE in standards compliant mode made it impossible to get my pages to render in IE, MacIE, Safari, and Firefox.

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2004
    Even in standards compliant mode, there are still rendering errors in IE (as well as Firefox). Unfortunately, this solution isn't the end all of problems with IE rendering.

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
    I casually realized a strange behaviour of Firefox 0.8/9 about DOCTYPE.
    If the doctype tag is absent in my document everything works.
    If it's present there'a visualization problem on a table (an alignment error of a cell) and a javascript can't access a W3C DOM paddingTop property

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2009
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  • Anonymous
    June 15, 2009
    PingBack from http://workfromhomecareer.info/story.php?id=29768