DOCTYPE in HTML/ XHTML documents and rendering modes
Acceptable standard doctypes to use for a text/html document as well as the browser rendering modes are shown here:
| HTML version | DTD type | Examples | Modern non-IE (1) | IE9/ IE8/ Opera 9.5 | IE7/ Opera 7.1 | IE6/ Opera 7.0 |
| HTML 5 | N.A. | <!DOCTYPE html> | S | S | A | A |
| HTML 4.01 | Strict | <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"> or with URL "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd" | S | S | A | A |
| Transitional | <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> | Q | Q | Q | Q | |
| Transitional (with URL) | As above with either URLs "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd" or "http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd" | A | A | A | A | |
| HTML 4.0 | Strict | <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN"> | S | S | A | A |
| Transitional | <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> | Q | Q | Q | Q | |
| Transitional (with URL) | As above with either URLs "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd" or "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd" | Q | A | A | A | |
| XHTML 1.1 | Strict | <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> | S | S | A | A (2) |
| XHTML 1.0 | Strict | <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd"> or <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> | S | S | A | A (2) |
| Transitional | <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> | A | A | A | A (2) |
Legend:
- S denotes standards mode (no quirks mode) – should always be used.
- A denotes Almost standards mode (limited quirks mode) – use this mode instead of standards mode if tables are used to layout (sliced) images.
- Q denotes Quirks mode (or IE 5.5 mode) – should no longer be used (except for backward compatibility).
Footnotes:
- Modern non-IE browsers include Mozilla 1.0.1/ Firefox/ Safari 0.9/ Chrome/ NS7/ Opera10/ Konq3.5/ HTML5 browsers
- Bug in IE6 will cause rendering to be in Quirk mode if standard XML declaration (<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>) is found.
A good source of information can be found here
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