(X)HTML standards

[graham.edmon]

i have to say one thing I notice on DF when it comes to web design or primarily HTML is that people are still using the old HTML standards. This isn't a problem at the moment, but we are all getting closer to the point where it is going to be a problem, where browsers start to ignore certain malformed HTML tags because although perfectly correct until HTML 4.2 they are not valid under strict XHTML 1.0.

So I thought, since I dont want to go to bed.. I would write a wee quick overview of XHTML for all your raw HTML coders out there.


basically (VERY basic)

every tag MUST be ended

for example

 <HR> 

is invalid, it is not ENDED, therefor under XHTML is SHOULD READ

 <hr /> 

two things to notice here....
1. the tag is in lower case.. this should ALWAYS be the case under XHTML, this includes attributes too, i.e.

 <a href="mpage.htm">goto</a> 

on the anchor tag

 <a...></a> 

then the tag is actually ended by the

 </a> 

which is correct.

as illustrated above for some other tags that don't (under HTML) need an end tag (

 <BR>,<HR> 

, etc) should be ended in the

 <tag[space]/>   i.e. <br /> or <hr /> 

notation.

When it comes to quoting attibutes, then it should ALWAYS be using the "rabbit ears" " notation, and never the ' single quote.

this allows the web page to become a well formed (strict,formal and transient (if I remember) which are different forms of XHTML).

so if you all want to give XHTML a try, you can easily check it using IE, since i will render HTML as XML if you request it to do so, and will report errors on any incorrect (not well formed) syntax.

you can refer to this http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/