Importance of W3 Standards

With the burgeoning popularity of the internet, new developmental tools are created daily. With these tools come new challenges – marketing, design, cross-browser transitions, etc. All of these can be a daunting task for those web gurus who aren’t well-versed in the W3 Standards. W3 (w3schools.com) is a resource for webmasters and programmers who want the most for their viewing public. There are numerous technologies used by programmers (ASP, PHP, and Javascript to name a few), but this article will focus solely on XHTML and CSS. W3 has a set of standards for both of these technologies, and making a website W3-compliant ensures that most all viewers will see the site exactly the same way (no matter what browser they’re using). Validation also helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because clean code means easier search-engine spidering.

Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is a technology often used in sites with many pages to make aesthetic changes easier. The style sheet is an exterior file that runs interdependently with the HTML (or outputted HTML) of a site. The style sheet serves as a template for the entire site’s color and font schemes, while also controlling borders, sizes, and more. Being able to edit a single file, instead of 100s of changes in many files saves time and precious web design dollars. Validation is imperative to get the most out of a website. That is, a user can upload or copy-and-paste their CSS file to the W3 site, and they’ll be given a list of any errors it contains.
Another of the technologies becoming more popular is Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML. XHTML is an extension of HTML 4.0, and, while in its infancy, has become quite prevalent. XHTML conforms to standards moreso than HTML. As such, it is more search-engine and user-friendly:

XHTML documents conform to XML. XML Tools can double as XHTML tools.

XHTML is an extension of HTML 4.0. It is more user-friendly and streamlined than HTML.

XHTML is a combination of HTML and XML in that it can run scripts and applets that use both the HTML and XML DOM (Document Object Model)

As XHTML grows, XHTML 1.0 documents will be able to interoperate among other XHTML documents making it a more browser transitional language.(Source: www.w3.org)

To conclude, using the standards of web development lined out by the W3 is imperative for users to get the most out of a site. Often, making a webpage W3-compliant is the first step of SEO, a marketing tool to get the most out of your advertising dollar. Validation is easy, and can be completed if a user has a basic knowledge of HTML-editing and FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Using these tools, coupled with the set of W3 standards can save a lot of money and help the site’s overall functionality.

David Davis, is the lead developer and project manager of RedflyStudios LTD. – Web Design Ireland. For more information visit http://www.redflystudios.com

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Image formats for web

It is important to optimize your web page. Images make up over 50 percent of web page. So, choosing the right image format is the first step in optimizing web graphics. There are 3 formats using in web, GIF, PNG and JPEG. You should expect the smallest file size while the picture is acceptable. I will not go to the technical details of every image format. There are a few tips for choosing the image format.

A logo with only a few colors: GIF or indexed PNG
GIFs and PNGs are palette-based, with file size related to the number of colors.

A photograph: JPG
JPEGs are designed to efficiently compress smooth-toned images such as photographs. You can control the quality of your images. The smaller file size produces jaggier image.

Anything with transparency: GIF
IE doesn’t support partial transparency in PNG.

Short animations: GIF
Every popular web browsers don’t support Motion PNG (MNG).

Local storage of original images: full color
PNGFull color PNG offers lossless compression. That provides perfect image quality but much larger file size than a JPEG.

IE7 breaks my website

It was warned in IE Blog that some of the bug fixes included in IE7 could break some websites. Because of Microsoft’s commitment to backwards compatibility websites based on the standards would be at the greatest risk of breaking, especially sites that use CSS hack to compensate for bugs in IE6. In long run, this is a good thing for web designers who love using CSS to layout their web. But in the short run, it will mean rewriting stylesheets.

Hacks are necessary while the majority browser handles complex CSS designs in difference way. However, it is possible to go entirely or almost hack-free. Try to make the CSS as clean as possible, and hack only for IE. Because other modern browsers are held to a higher standard (and problems occur in them cannot be easily worked around). IE7 is just the first step for MS to make a more compliant web browser. I expect to write CSS without any hack in the future.

In my Thai website, MS Sans Serif is my major font. The problem is IE7 does not support non-truetype font anymore. So the browser cannot break words correctly. Some words are repeated in begin of the next line. The only solution I do is using Tahoma to be a major font (that’s not a nice font in my eyes).

Design your web layout tableless

What wrong with tables?
If the table widths are not specified, all the text in the table needs to be rendered before the browser can figure out wide to make the various table cells. This means that you cannot see anything until everything in the table is loaded. To make tables more quickly is to specify the widths for all the table columns. But the problem is that your web page cannot be resized to fit the screen.
Remember that tables are only intended for tabular data and do not use them for layouts.

Use CSS for layoutsThe W3C introduced Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to enabled the ability to apply styles to HTML documents. Most web designers are only use it to apply simple styles to their HTML, like font type and color, and background colors and images. However, the robust use of CSS for layouts did not have wide-spread occurrence until much later. If coded well, CSS makes it easy to apply global changes to the layout. All browsers today support CSS for controlling layouts (although some browser like IE sometimes requires some CSS hacks).

Firefox2 beats IE7 in first round?

After the official launch of this two most popular web browser. There are more than 2 million people were using Firefox2 in the first 24 hours. Compre that to 3 million downloads in 96 hours. Can we say that Firefox2 is more popular than IE7? .. I don't think so. According my website's statistics today, IE7 users is about 4 times greater that Firefox2's.