All modern browsers seek to be standards compliant… honest. The problem is that several of them are dragging an iron-chain history of standards ignorance and proprietary initiatives. That is a really colorful and bloated way of saying backwards compliance to methods that are known to fail.
The cause of the problem is market-share. You cannot simply abandon all previously applied methods, no matter how much of a violation, without inciting a riot. This is partly the fault of the browser for maintaining obsolete methods but it is far more the fault of the designers still reliant upon those obsolete methods. Dated and obsolete designers are never going away until they loose the ability to produce according to such methods.
The solution is easy. The browser designers need to reduce their stress by making a compromised stand. Modern browsers should allow anything and everything to fly if the document contains either no mime type or a mime type of text/html. Simply ignore the doctype and proceed with everything in quirks more and transitional.
For the designers who are attempting to use well structured code and comply to the standards the browsers should only process code that is well-formed according to the syntax of XML and definitions of the stated doctype. Browsers should operate in that manner if the documents are using the mime type of application/xhtml+xml. This means the browsers should have two seperate processing engines that are used in regards to the document's mime type.
An added bonus to this method of development is that HTML 5 can be completely ignored in favor of HTML 2.0, which will allow for better data implementations. If groups like Google and Yahoo wish to preserve the use of obsolete mime types and dated techniques they can build their browsers.
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