: Are there any good reasons to intentionally serve a new web site in Quirks mode? I was a little surprised that Amazon's site doesn't specify a doctype, and is rendered in quirks mode. What

@Hamaas447

To answer the question in your title of whether there are any good reasons to use Quirks for a new site - no there aren't. Standards greatly increase cross-browser compatibility, making development much easier and faster.

To answer your question of why a site like Amazon uses Quirks - firstly, they aren't new (their first sale was in July 1995), and secondly, it's probably not cost effective for them to change.

Unfortunately, good quality standards haven't been around throughout web development history. A site as old as Amazon is likely to have needed hacky tricks to make everything work up to this point, all of which would have to be rewritten. As JamesRyan says, it's a lot of work to update an entire site to use standards. A part of this is updating code, but I'd argue a more significant part is in time-consuming testing. Then there's the significant risk of lost income due to introduced bugs, which would affect revenue and in serious conditions, market value (probably only temporarily).

Amazon works, and works pretty well. Considering that and the risks involved, how do you think the business would justify making the site standards compliant, when it would mean average Joe User miss out on new features that will gain Amazon more revenue?

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@Kristi941

Bandwidth.

(Which is to say: you're looking at this the wrong way and so asking the wrong question. Quirks mode is just a side-effect of what they're actually doing.)

Your immediate reaction to this will be that it couldn't possibly be much. But multiply that small amount by their traffic, and it suddenly becomes a real number. Sites like Amazon(Google, Yahoo...) have to take things into consideration that you might never even think about, and also employ cheats that would normally be unacceptable if you're just going for standards compliance, but are still workable.

If Amazon ever does use local storage, or anything else quirks mode would definitely break, you'll see a doctype get added immediately; right now though, it's a technically correct but also theoretical(in this context) argument.

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@Tiffany637

Probably because their site is massive and the work required to update it all and test that it looks right across the site in all browsers is a huge amount of effort for little or no gain.

The browser world changes so rapidly, you can look at pretty much any major site and they will be using something that has a newer better alternative.

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