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Asked: 2026-06-12T19:49:11+00:00

have been using no DOCTYPE but rather simply starting with <html> as per HTML5

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have been using no DOCTYPE but rather simply starting with <html> as per HTML5 standards (as I understood them). everything going ok.

began using Jade, which insists on DOCTYPE. using <!DOCTYPE html> – pages no longer render correctly(?).

as an easy and trivial example (behavior is same on firefox and chrome):

<html>
    <body >
        <div style='height:50%; background-color:pink;'></div>
        <div style='height:50%; background-color:blue;'></div>
    </body>
</html>

render just fine – have page pink, half blue

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <body >
        <div style='height:50%; background-color:pink;'></div>
        <div style='height:50%; background-color:blue;'></div>
    </body>
</html>

renders two skinny DIV’s you can’t see.

  1. what’s going on?
  2. thought DOCTYPE was being deprecated for HTML5
  3. what should I be doing?
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Whoever who told you that DOCTYPE is deprecated is either playing a prank on you or is plain ignorant.

    W3C on its article HTML5 differences from HTML4 on the section Syntax, sub section 2.2 clearly states this.

    The HTML syntax of HTML5 requires a doctype to be specified to ensure
    that the browser renders the page in standards mode. The doctype has
    no other purpose and is therefore optional for XML. Documents with an
    XML media type are always handled in standards mode. [DOCTYPE]

    The doctype declaration is <!DOCTYPE html> and is case-insensitive in
    the HTML syntax. Doctypes from earlier versions of HTML were longer
    because the HTML language was SGML-based and therefore required a
    reference to a DTD. With HTML5 this is no longer the case and the
    doctype is only needed to enable standards mode for documents written
    using the HTML syntax. Browsers already do this for <!DOCTYPE html>.

    And as to, why the behavior when you set <!DOCTYPE html> in your example.

    This behavior is expected. This is because body is a block level element. So it has height, by default, in a shrink-to-fit model and width, by default, in an expand-to-fit model. Setting style="height:100%;" in the body tag allows body to take up the whole of the height available and displays your two divs.

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