Web Coding Standards

[RobDog888]

I need to put together a document on the latest web standards for compliancy, validation and accessibility.

Something like ...

• Xhtml (not Strict)
• CSS
• Web Accessiblity

I already have
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/

But I need more official updated links and also need documentation for the other topics like WC3.

Thanks

[mendhak]

The obvious starts are:
XHTML: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
CSS: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/

And I am not entirely sure what you want to glean from those links, but you could also probably include links to the validators:

Page: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
WAI: http://www.smartlabsoftware.com/wai-validator.htm

[RobDog888]

Thanks froggy. Any personal inputs (do's and donts, style preferences etc) seeing how you are a pro-web developer.

[mendhak]

Lots! Keep CSS separate. Keep JS separate. Use AJAX to improve functionality if you must, but don't use it such that the website depends on it. Same goes for flash and silverlight - anything that a crawler can't see, if important, hits you hard. Don't use _target to open new windows. Don't use modaldialogboxes.

Use descriptive titles. Simple layouts. Image alt tags.

If you use ASP.NET, keep the UI functionality (.aspx.vb) separate from the UI (.aspx). Minimize viewstate sent to the client (example: don't put datasets in viewstate). Use common sense.

[Kasracer]

Use relative links! Unless you're linking to a completely different website, it's completely unnecessary.

Avoid CSS and HTML hacks where possible. I had to work on a site for a large bank and we were not allowed to use any CSS or HTML hacks and it had to look good on IE6, IE7 (not a requirement though; don't ask me why), Firefox and IE for the Mac. In the end, we got their new layout of their web application working without any hacks but we eventually caved and used one for IE on the Mac (I forget what it was but there was no way around it unless we wanted to serve seperate style sheets).

Don't serve seperate style sheets per browser.

Use Object/Capability Detection instead of parsing user agent strings (never parse a user agent string).
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/u...ity-detection/
http://developer.apple.com/internet/...detection.html

Use Print and Mobile styles sheets when possible (sometimes using a seperate version of the page for a mobile device is necessary if you need to hide lots of data but it's best to avoid this page duplication where possible).

Don't overuse classes. Instead, target specific elements within classes when it makes sense.

Pages need to degrade seemlessly. If someone is using IE4 on your website, while it may not look good it should at least gracefully break so that it's still readable. This means avoid absolute positioning where possible and making liberal use of relative positioning. Basically make sure the HTML elements are in a good order.

[penagate]

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/

[RobDog888]

Thanks PG. Tons to read there