What is the difference in doc types

okay, something I've been meaning to figure out for a while.

What are the different d开发者_高级运维oc types and what do they mean? Anytime I've done my own limited research on this, I keep getting confused by references to DTD and quirks mode and such, which I don't understand either.

Thank you!

Doctypes are for telling browser what (X)HTML standard your document is using. That way, the browser knows how to interpret the data and how to render it on screen. Examples here: http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html