Overview
The structure and appearance of a web page is described by a combination of two standardized languages: HTML, a markup language designed for web use, which describes the structure and content of the page, and CSS, a generalized stylesheet language, which specifies how the page should be rendered in various media (visual styles for screen display, print styles to use when printing the page, aural styles to use when the page is read aloud by a screen reader, etc.). However, most older web browsers either did not fully implement the specifications for these languages or were developed prior to the finalization of the specifications (Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.0 for the Macintosh platform, released in 2000, was the first major web browser with full support for CSS Level 1, for example). As a result, many older web pages were constructed to rely upon the older browsers' incomplete or incorrect implementations, and will only render as intended when handled by such a browser.
Support for standardized HTML and CSS in major web browsers has improved significantly, but the large body of legacy documents which rely on the quirks of older browsers represents an obstacle for browser developers, who wish to improve their support for standardized HTML and CSS, but also wish to maintain backward compatibility with older, non-standardized pages. Additionally, many new web pages continue to be created in the older fashion, since the compatibility workarounds introduced by browser developers mean that an understanding of standardized methods is not strictly necessary.
To maintain compatibility with the greatest possible number of web pages, modern web browsers are generally developed with multiple rendering modes: in "standards mode" pages are rendered according to the HTML and CSS specifications, while in "quirks mode" attempts are made to emulate the behavior of older browsers. Some browsers (those based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, or Internet Explorer 8 in strict mode, for example) also use an "almost standards" mode which attempts to compromise between the two, implementing one quirk for table cell sizing while otherwise conforming to the specifications.
Read more about this topic: Quirks Mode