non erat sem All thanks to Microsoft apparently: “The DOCTYPE declaration, which should be the first tag in the source markup of any web page, is utilized by the web browser to identify the version of the markup language in which the page is written. It may contain a link to a Document Type Definition, or DTD for short. The DTD sets out the rules and grammar for that flavor of markup, thus enabling the browser to render the content accordingly. You can thank Microsoft for many of the features of this enigmatic tag because it was they who, while developing Internet Explorer 5, discovered that they had improved standards support so much, that it caused older pages to display incorrectly in browsers. To fix the problem, they modified the DOCTYPE tag so that it could designate that the page be rendered either in "quirks mode" or "standards mode.". Later, when Mozilla released Netscape 1.1, they inadvertently broke thousands of pages that relied on one or two specific quirks. Their solution was the advent of an almost standards mode.” 1 1. https://www.htmlgoodies.com/html5/markup/the-doctype-tag-and-its-effect-on-page-rendering.html