Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Dalewyn 1175 days ago
For the younger greenhorns among us: Once upon a time, we used to declare what version of HTML a page was written in with the doctype tag at the very top of the file.

Certain versions of HTML thus declared, incorrectly formed doctypes, or more often the absence of the doctype declaration altogether, would tell most rendering engines to enter Quirks Mode and render the page with backwards compatibility as the highest priority.
1 comments
Timwi 1174 days ago
> we used to declare what version of HTML a page was written in with the doctype tag at the very top of the file.

Um, we still do that. It's just that the doctype for HTML 5 is very short and doesn't mention the version number explicitly. (It's `<!DOCTYPE html>`.)

link