Using Web Standards in your Web Pages

"Browser makers are no longer the problem. The problem lies with designers and developers chained to the browser-quirk-oriented markup of the 1990s-often because they don't realize it is possible to support current standards while accommodating old browsers."

This article provides an overview of the process for upgrading the content of your web pages to conform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web standards. The first 2 sections address exclusively validation issues, benefits of validation, deprecated elements, deprecated attributes. How to upgrade a webpage markup code to pass validation and how to implement CSS are addressed by providing recommendations, tutorials and references.

The other sections address DOM and DHTML coding practices which are at odds with the W3C web standards and suggest replacements. Every proposed W3C web standards replacement in this article is working without a problem in modern browsers like MSIE 7, Firefox 2, Opera 9, Safari 3, Konqueror 3.5+, Icab 4, etc.

The next-to-last section, Summary of Changes, outlines all the changes described in this article. The last section offers excellent and best references for those wishing to learn more about upgrading techniques presented in this article and more for those wishing to perfect their web pages.

Contents

  1. Benefits of using web standards
  2. Making your page using web standards - how to
  3. Using the W3C DOM
  4. Developing Cross Browser and Cross Platform Pages
  5. Using XMLHttpRequest
  6. Summary of Changes
  7. References

Original Document Information

  • Author(s): Mike Cowperthwaite, Marcio Galli, Jim Ley, Ian Oeschger, Simon Paquet, GΓ©rard Talbot
  • Last Updated Date: May 29, 2008
  • Copyright Information: Portions of this content are © 1998–2008 by individual mozilla.org contributors; content available under a Creative Commons license | Details.