What's the use of DTD?

message from e_FreshMEAT on 16 Jul 2004
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"

it is a loose declaration of a HTML doc, but what is the difference to Strict,
manual says that the Transitional declaration does surpport for deprecated
entities(e.g. unordered list, bullet style type), but I tried deprecated
entities in Strict HTML document, but it works properly, so I'm puzzled, why
there is a dtd on top of a document, and seems useless, what's "prevent from
'quirks' rendering", how does them works? details please
 
Gary White replied to e_FreshMEAT on 16 Jul 2004
See http://www.ericmeyeroncss.com/bonus/render-mode.html

Gary
 
John Waller replied to e_FreshMEAT on 17 Jul 2004
Also

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype/
 

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