----------------------------------- rdrake Mon Oct 24, 2005 4:03 pm Web Standards ----------------------------------- The importance of writing standards compliant web pages. You're probably wondering "why should I abandon Microsoft FrontPage when it makes things so much easier?" Well, it may seem easier, but in the long run it is much easier to maintain pages which are hand coded and standards compliant. In the beginning of the web, each of the major browsers invented their own tags in order to stay ahead of the competition. This resulted in many pages looking perfectly fine in one browser while being completely distorted in another. These pages are said to be running in "quirks" mode. This was obviously a problem, so the W3C set out to create standards for the web in order to control the situation. Web pages we create today are mostly a combination of HTML and CSS. Before CSS, web designers had to use tags like the tag in order to create different effects. Not only did this create a lot of useless code, but it also made it much harder to separate the content from the layout tags. CSS (cascading style sheets) are an excellent alternative to using the old, depreciated tags. More on CSS later. There are several standards which are in place.HTML & XHTML HTML is one of the most widely used ways of sharing information on the internet. It was one of the first methods, and still remains the most popular. Some formats (such as XHTML) have come to replace it, but they haven't succeeded. Some say XHTML will die out soon, as it is not much more useful than HTML, it just has some more strict rules to it. After the browser wars, HTML was a mess. There were so many oprietary tags in use, and pages were barely showing up in the competitors' browsers. This was one of the first web items to be standardized, as far as web pages go. The W3C created a list of tags which it found to be useful, and cut out many of the useless tags which were created by Microsoft and Netscape. In order to specify which HTML/XHTML standard your page follows, you will need to include a doctype declaration at the top of each page. Here are some of the most common ones: