What DOCTYPE should I target today?

asp.net html asp.net-ajax doctype w3c-validation
GenEric35 picture GenEric35 · Jul 14, 2010 · Viewed 7.2k times · Source

I'm refactoring a .Net web application that is in 

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >

Right now the approach is just to aim for the stars and go for the latest doctype just because it's latest, I would like to make a wiser choice and target a specific one and for good reasons.

There are similar questions existing but the answers might be outdated now.

What is the difference, advantages, disadvantages between standards and quirks mode, what are some quirks I may run into with differently set doctypes?

I have been told that an XHTML doctype is preferable to integrate AJAX since the UpadtePanel serializes it and to do so needs to have a XHTML do type, to what extent is this true?

And for browser compatibility, in which direction are browsers going in terms of DOCTYPE, is there a common thrend or do they differ?

Answer

Yann Ramin picture Yann Ramin · Jul 14, 2010

HTML5 doctype, which is

<!DOCTYPE html>

XHTML is largely dead as a standard, and never was implemented correctly in most cases.

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