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TOGoS | 6 months ago

> We have <!doctype html> but why not add other doc types as time goes on

We do have older ones!

  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">

and

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

Unfortunately the "be liberal in what you accept" principle, in combination with general incompetence and anti-competitive practices by certain browser vendors, meant that all the browsers kind of ignored it and treated everything as quasi-structured tag soup regardless of the doctype, which is why WHATWG tried to codify what the browsers were already doing and decided we should all just <!doctype html>.

Have we collectively learned the lesson? If so maybe we could have a new doctype for [X]HTML 6. I won't be holding my breath for it.

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