Reminds me of how awkward HTML doctypes used to be. Nowadays it's very simple, but in the past? You had to refer to the URL of the doctype declaration on every page

> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

This plus the X-UA-Compatible stuff mentioned in the article meant that for many people, the first few lines of code on a web page were something they probably copied from a tutorial or reference document every time, at least if they didn't have a CMS handy.

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Telemakhos 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You only had to include a doctype if you needed to turn on strict XML rendering or do fun things with XSLT. It was great if you wanted to convert, say, TEI to something browsers could read.

You were always, since the days of HTML 1.0, able to use just <html> to open your document without a doctype. It would be in tag-soup mode, but for most documents (rather than applications) that was fine. Not only do you not need a doctype, but you don't even need a <head> statement... browsers will generate one if you leave it out.

	▲	Klonoar 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I am almost positive that there was one version of IE where having any space or newline before the DocType would trigger quirks mode.
	▲	zdragnar 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Technically yes, but the struggle to keep IE out of quirks mode was real, and that meant a doctype and head and all the things.

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TeMPOraL 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Like many, I ended up memorizing the pattern at some point, and then typing it from memory.

	▲	edoceo 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My editor had templates and snippets. Very lux in 2000.