A doctype or document type declaration is an instruction which tells the web browser about the markup language in which the current page is written. Some browsers respond more reliably to XHTML and so display the pages consistently, even across platforms. This version added support for style sheets and scripting ability for multimedia elements. For example, if you leave off tags in HTML, your code will still work reliably. It was followed by HTML 4.0 in 1998 and 4.01 in 1999. Currently, the most common version in use is XHTML, but HTML 5, a … specification by which HTML documents are classified into different categories Be sure to use a DOCTYPE in your HTML document. Historically doctypes were intended to declare which version and subset of HTML were used. In other cases, nascent features are not supporte… In December of 1997, HTML 4.0 was published as a recommendation by the W3C. HTML Navigational Element (