Web Standards and Web Design

June 11, 2005, 10:36 pm

Standards are made for conformance or interoperability between different organizations, institutions, formats, and others. It is also defined as a specification by which others may be measured. There are lots of standardization organizations, like the ISO (International Standards Organization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission).

The world wide web (or the graphical portion of the Internet as you already know) has also a group that leads in its standardization. The W3C (World Wide Web Constorium) was founded by the father of the web himself. Although it is not a crime not to follow the lead by the W3C, it defeats the purpose of establishing standards. Even most web browsers are designed to support such standards. Most notable are the present Mozilla browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Safari for the Mac. The current version of Internet Explorer (IE6) have issues of not being compliant.

Web Design

It is noteworthy to develop web sites that are standards compliant. Preferrably, we should create sites in XHTML (Extensible HTML) format that relies heavily on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for design and document layout. Many of the savvy web developers here are already practicing creating sites in XHTML, but for those who are new to this, here are some points to be noted.

First off, what is the difference between HTML and XHTML? Aside from the additional ‘X’, XHTML separate the function of “mark up” and “layout and design”. The mark up only identifies which part is a paragraph, a line break, a table cell, a header or others. We then use stylesheets to layout and design the pages. This way, we would not have a hard time changing our design.

Take this example. Assuming you created a static website containing about twenty pages you and wanted to change the background color. Normally, in HTML, you would change all the bgcolor attribute of everyone of those twenty pages. However, if you linked this pages into a stylesheet instead, you would have just modified the stylesheet once and you are done.

Aside from that, here are also things that are new to XHTML.

• Every XHTML documents should have a DOCTYPE declaration
• Every XHTML elements should be nested within the root element.
• Properly nest XHTML elements.
• Tag names and attribute names must all be in lower case.
• XHTML elements must always be paired with its closing tags, like <p>paragraph</p>
• Standalone tags like <br> should also be closed like <br /> and <hr />.
• Attributes must be quoted.
• Do not minimize attribute, like <input readonly /> should be <input readonly="readonly" />.
• Replace the name attribute with the id attribute.
• The title element and the xmlns are mandatory.
• If you use the lang attribute in an element, it should also have the xml:lang attribute

The W3C also has an authoring guide which one can follow in order to have pages that are easy to maintain, look acceptable to users, and can be accessed by those with disabilities.

The W3 Schools have references that covers XHTML tags, attributes, and events.

Posted by Francis under: Web Design

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