The first few pictures I took in KL were my host's dog, and her puppies. They're so cute! I'll post the pictures later when I've got time. Had a fun time playing with the puppies. I can't remember the name of the breed though. Oh well.
I did quite alot of reading during the bus ride, occasionally taking breaks off the book "Designing with Web Standards" to avoid puking all over the coach. I'm almost half way through. I'll write a review on it when I'm done. If you notice, what I'm typing here is almost a review already. I'll just copy and paste and add and brush up on the sentence structure to create a proper review.
It's quite an interesting book that approaches web standards in a lenient way, coaxing everyone to eventually follow what XHTML and CSS were intended for.
I've completely finished the first part of the book, which is "Houston, We Have A Problem", which talks about why XHTML and CSS is good, why customers should change their mindsets on legacy browsers, and so on. It's more for the business side of web development, trying to convince the management that following the web standards are good, and that web standards are matured enough. Not my cup of tea, but I browsed through anyway, and learnt quite a few things about the history of the web, and how it evolved from a "snatching the pie" to a "sharing the pie". I too think that it's time we embraced the new standards and follow closely and strictly to it, but of course, the wonderful thing is they also provide a less strict version called the XHTML transitional, for people who are too used to the old style HTML. For me, I like to keep my code strict.
The second part of the book is more technical, and much suited for people like me. There's a few things I'll like to point out, that I find it very useful.
9 Rules of XHTML (from Designing with Web Standards)
- Start your html file with a proper DOCTYPE and namespace
e.g.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
(Who actually memorises these stuff anyway!? Here is the link to these templates - http://www.webstandards.org/learn/templates/index.html) - Use META Content element to declare your content type
e.g.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> - All elements and attribute names are in lowercase
e.g.
<body> instead of <BODY> - Put quotes to all attributes
e.g.
<table width="75%"> instead of <table width=75%> - Assign values to all attributes
e.g.
<td nowrap="nowrap"> instead of <td nowrap> - Close all tags
e.g.
<p>Text</p> instead of <p>Text - Close empty tags with a space and a slash
e.g.
<br /> instead of <br> - Comments should not consist of any dashes between it
e.g.
<!-- Test --> instead of <!---------- Test ---------> - Use Markup symbols instead of the symbols themselves
e.g.
< instead of <
Those are all about it. Surprisingly simple, don't you think? Follow those closely and you will almost have a valid XHTML page. I'm still reading more stuff about how to code the entire page in pure Presentation and Structure seperately. I'll post more when I'm through with it.
Here are some great links from the book.
Learn how to code css in the most experimental way ever.
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/
Web Standards Project - Learn more about the standards in layman's term
http://www.webstandards.org
W3C Validation Service - Check if your webpage is valid
http://validator.w3.org
Tidy - convert your current HTML to a neat and almost proper XHTML
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
Well, I've got a presentation to do in the afternoon, and I've got to wake up in 3 hours. I'll write more later today and post some pictures I took of the cute puppies.
Cheerios.
2 comments:
Emh..lot things seemed so familiar... Have Fun in KL
We come from the era of good html practises. Some of those people that started html early didn't really follow any strict style of coding, but very loosely structured codes. Hence all these points might seem very trivial to us, but it's the basis of XHTML.
Post a Comment