What is the advantag of a "DOCTYPE declaration"

Dear Sirs

Currently our programmers work on the relaunch of our website. Today I have checked the current website in your validator and found
out, that we don't use such a declaration. I wondered a bit and had a look to google.com, yahoo.com and amazon.com. These 3 websites
also don't have such what.

So my question would be: What is the advantage of such a DOCTYPE declaration? If there is an advantage, why do the biggest websites
in the world not use such a declaration?
Resp. what is the disadvantage, if we do not use a DOCTYPE declaration?

I am looking forward to some answers. Thank your in advance.
Here the result of the test of http://www.finanznachrichten.de/nachrichten/index.asp:



Below are the results of attempting to parse this document with an SGML parser.

Fatal Error: no document type declaration; will parse without validation

I could not parse this document, because it uses a public identifier that is not in my catalog.

You should make the first line of your HTML document a DOCTYPE declaration, for example, for a typical HTML 4.01 document:

      <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
      <HTML>
	<HEAD>
	  <TITLE>Title</TITLE>
	</HEAD>

	<BODY>
	  <-- ... body of document ... -->
	</BODY>
      </HTML>

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry, I can't validate this document.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source Listing
Below is the source input I used for this validation:

   1:
   2: <html><head><title>FinanzNachrichten.de - Alle News zu Aktien, Börse und Wirtschaft!!</title>
   3: <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
   4: <META NAME="Author" CONTENT="FinanzNachrichen.de - Alle News zu Aktien, Börse und Wirtschaft!!">
   5: <META NAME="Publisher" CONTENT=" FinanzNachrichen.de - Alle News zu Aktien, Börse und Wirtschaft!!">
   6: <META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="30 days">
   7: <META NAME="keywords"
content="Finanznachrichten,Finanz-Nachrichten,Zocker,Aktie,Aktien,Analyse,Aktienkurse,Aktienfonds,Anleihen,Börse,Charts,DAX,DOW,Fina
nzen,Forum,Musterdepot,Nachrichten,NEMAX,Neuer Markt,News,Newsletter,NASDAQ,Online,Realtime,Realtimekurse,Wallstreet,Wirtschaft">
   8: <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="FinanzNachrichten.de bietet Ihnen die wichtigsten News für den Bereich Aktien, Börse und
Wirtschaft mit täglich rund 1.500 Wirtschaftsmeldungen!">
   9: <META NAME="robots" content="index, follow">
  10: <link rel="StyleSheet" href="../fnt.css" type="text/css">
  11: <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.finanznachrichten.de/favicon.ico">
  12: </head>




Best regards

FINANZNACHRICHTEN.DE
Markus Meister

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http://www.FinanzNachrichten.de
Alle News zu Aktien, Börse und Wirtschaft!!
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Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2001 08:07:11 UTC