Browser Specific Doctype Information

If you’ve had difficulties getting your web page to display correctly in more than one browser, you’re not alone. The unlikely culprit might just be in the Doctype tag that you may or may not have added to your document.

QuirksMode goes into significant depth on the issue: “When Netscape 4 and Explorer 4 implemented CSS, their support did not match the W3C standard (or, indeed, each other). Netscape 4 had horribly broken support. Explorer 4 came far closer to the standard, but didn’t implement it with complete correctness either. Although Explorer 5 Windows mended quite a lot of Explorer 4 bugs, it perpetuated other glitches in CSS (mainly the box model).

To make sure that their websites rendered correctly in the various browsers, web developers had to implement CSS according to the wishes of these browsers. Thus, most websites used CSS in ways that didn’t quite match the specifications.

Therefore, when standards compliancy became important browser vendors faced a tough choice. Moving closer to the W3C specifications was the way to go, but if they’d just change the CSS implementations to match the standards perfectly, many websites would break to a greater or lesser extent. Existing CSS would start to show odd side effects if it were suddenly interpreted in the correct way.

So moving closer to standards compliance would cause problems. On the other hand, not moving closer to standards compliance would perpetuate the general confusion of the Browser Wars Era.”

Read the Full Article at QuirksMode.Org and learn more about the solution to this potential problem. Be sure to check out the very very bottom of the article for a thorough browser comparison chart!