Hmmm... I think the main reason for using a doctype (which still counted in IE3) is to declare what code standard you're coding to.

The whole quirks mode vs. standards mode thing always struck me as a huge drag, creating confusion for the sake of allowing web developers not to bother to learn good web development.

It's definitely worth documenting, but I think it's always good to state first that the doctype declaration tells people and software what your code is.

One of the main problems with using the HTML 4.01 transitional doctype is that ASP.Net out of the box breaks that doctype by using a self closing postback value, using a name attribute on the Form element and by not designing Custom Web Controls to be able to emit links within the HEAD section of a HTML document forcing developers to put JavaScript and CSS in the body of a document...

Most annoying!

"The junk galore you see in 99% of web pages today reflects the chaos bred by the browser wars."

Is that figuratively 99%? Else who estimated 99%?

This evil number makes baby standardistas cry.

Actually, I think this number came from Zeldman's book. I need to look it up to verify.

Really very fabulous article.
After reading this article ,I am quite clear with what actually a doctype is and why is used.
And also I got to know why certain things in javascript work with only a particular browser,esp I.E
Thanks a lot for the explanation