Web standards
   

First, here's one take on standards that comes from the Zen Garden people. Begin reading Zeldman's preface, Before You Begin, and Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4.

  1. Standards began because of non-semantic markup, nonstandard browsers (“user agents”)
  2. Needed to streamline work, code
  3. WaSP tried to promote W3C standards (recommendations)
  4. Use of CSS 3, XHTML 1.0+, HTML 5, DOM level 1 or 2.
  5. Image replacement (IR) became key; background image shows on the page, which replaces text in the code (e.g.<h1>). See Dave Shea's page at mezzoblue.com.
  6. Zen Garden a good place to learn standards-based design. Still many need to use filters and hacks [serve to certain browsers, e.g. * for IE lte 6, > for Mozilla, @import for old Netscape 4.x]
  7. Semantic markup: use the tools as they were intended.
  8. With CSS you can do all the formatting you need
  9. [A goal of this is ultimately to serve content as XHTML, that is, as an XML application. That means <link type="application/xml"> MIME type, part of AJAX. In XML all elements have meaning, e.g. <price><title><blockquote>, perhaps <paragraph>].
  10. Note in 9 that elements are opening tag, content if any, closing tag. e.g.:
    <p>This whole line is a paragraph element.</p>
  11. Standards means
    1. DOCTYPE e.g. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 Transitional//EN"> Note for HTML5 it's <!DOCTYPE html>
    2. <html ... lang="en">
    3. <meta ... content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
    4. limit the <div>s; limit elements in general
    5. add class and id [Q: What are they used for? Q: what denotes class and id in CSS? A: .stuff and #item]. Note: can have class="top right"
    6. typographic characters &#9992; (HTML decimal) OR &#x2708; (HTML hex) or Unicode-UTF-8
    7. testing at least in IE, a Mozilla [Firefox for us] and a Webkit (Safari or Chrome)
    8. Check accessibility (Bobby, JAWS)

CSS: Needs XHTML that is well-formed and valid (run the w3c validator or use Firefox Web developer toolbar)

CSS Benefits:

  • smaller file size (use external CSS)
  • more portable, works if no CSS or can use media types (media="print")
  • fewer page versions needed
  • more accessible
  • more precise

 

Then we'll take a look at Dmitri Glazkov's "State of the Web" presentation that I went to. Note that he did not discuss REST when I was there, and that these are his slides not mine (used with permission). But you'll see a good overview of some of the issues, notice how Standards run through everything, and preview some things we'll get back to. Be sure to look through WaSP and take a look at microformats , try the hCard creator, and see how the same issues arise.

Note that a few key people and resources come up: Dave Shea from Zen GArden, Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer , and the WaSP.


Back to home page