The admittedly older books that I have infer that using the DOCTYPE will
actively **break** your HTML documents.

Presumably, the newer browsers "like but do not require" it, while
documents with it will cause trouble with older browsers.  It's not clear
at what point this changed...  Netscape 3? Netscape 4? IE 4? IE 5?

I don't want to put anything in my HTML which will cause people to not be
able to read them.  I believe in backwards compatibility.

Or am I misunderstanding this behaviour?

\\/
http://www.wlindley.com