Importance of Proper DOCTYPE Usage

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Many inexperienced web developers often skip over or miss-understand the importance of DOCTYPE declarations. It is of crucial importance in today’s web development world to properly define your markup. If improper DOCTYPE is used, you can easily cause IE to switch to quirks mode. I am not going to get into quirks mode in this post, please do a search for more information!

Please note that for many of my demonstrations and tutorials to work, especially in Internet Explorer, you must be using a standards compliant !DOCTYPE, which for IE this needs to be in the first line of your HTML.

If you are using the all-to-common:

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″? >

Beware! This will cause IE to switch into quirks mode.

For more information about DOCTYPE declarations please see the WC3 list of recommended DTDs.