I never run out of opportunities to preach to web coders who still haven’t a clue what web standards are about. So listen up to this public service announcement:
The latest issue of Cre@te Online, the UK web design magazine, has a good tutorial on writing compliant XHTML 1.0 which is a transition between HTML (design) and XML (structure). Essentially we are progressing towards the separation of content from style.
The first thing we need to do is to keep our HTML clean: no overlapping tags; backslashes to close each standalone tag (such as ‘br /’), use of ‘strong’ and ’em’ rather than ‘b’ and ‘i’ respectively, naming of all images with ALT text for accessibility… you get the general drift.
For instant gratification (and further information), go look up the W3C.
As for my new new NEW re-design, the pages coded in HTML so far are totally compliant, right down to the CSS, but nobody can see the new site until I stop changing my … mind.