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Do HTML doctypes guarantee formal parsing?
For example if i use a particular doctype and then produce really bad HTML, will this force the browser to revert to a Quirks mode or guarantee parsing to the doctype?
EDIT: This includes CSS behaviour too.
No.
You’ll be hard pressed to find a browser that will parse using SGML rules under any circumstances.
An XHTML Content-type will trigger some browsers to parse using XML rules.
Most browsers will use their own tag soup parser or the HTML 5 algorithm for any text/html document.
Quirks mode has very little to do with parsing. It is mostly about how CSS is interpreted.
The choice between Quirks / Standards / Almost Standards / etc modes is handled almost entirely by the Doctype though. The exceptions are having an XHTML MIME type (which will force some browsers to standards mode, no matter what the Doctype) and (in the case of MSIE) X-UA-Compatible HTTP headers and
<meta>data.