Home/ Questions/Q 664091
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-13T23:33:42+00:00

I have a page which needs to be rendered in Quirks mode for the

  • 0

I have a page which needs to be rendered in Quirks mode for the page to be loaded properly. The problem is that the page uses valid XHTML and thus has a doctype. This forces the page to render in Standards mode in all browsers. Is there any workaround/hack that can force Quirks mode eventhough I have a doctype?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    See http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/ for changing the DOCTYPE to Almost Standards mode or Quirks mode. Excerpts below. (Assumes a Content-Type of text/html.)

    Almost Standards mode:

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

    This gives you the Almost Standards mode. Please note that your
    layouts based on sliced images in tables are likely to break if you
    later move to HTML5 (and, hence, the full Standards mode), so it’s
    better to make your designs Standards mode-compatible right now.

    Quirks mode:

    No doctype.

    Please don’t do this. Willfully designing for the Quirks mode will
    come and haunt you, your coworkers or your successors in the future.

    XHTML doctype:

    I am not recommending any of the XHTML doctypes, because serving XHTML
    as text/html is considered harmful    . If you choose to use an XHTML
    doctype anyway, please note that the XML declaration makes IE 6 (but
    not IE 7!) trigger the Quirks mode.

    • 0