html - back to basics

Well, not posted for a while...so catching up!

I recently read an interesting article about on sitepoint.com:37 Steps to Perfect Markup

Will not comment much more about this article (hey, doing 2 posts in a row, that's not too bad already!), except by providing a selection of things I took away after reading it.

[...] The reality is that the most commonly used browser, Internet Explorer, does not support XHTML in any way, shape or form

coding a web page in xhtml is achieved by restricting it to its html markups... which is in other words coding in html. So if a web designer comes to you saying proudly, "I develop in Xhtml", you can remind him/her that it doesn't mean anything really... Having said that, it demonstrates at least that this person can code using strict dtd, which is something to be proud of.

The distinction in HTML has to do with semantics and syntax, while the distinction in CSS has to do with rendering and presentation

nicely said.

[...]A line break (br) is mostly a presentational tool, and should be handled by CSS rather than HTML.However, there are a few cases where line breaks can be said to have semantic meaning, for instance in poetry, song lyrics, postal addresses and computer code samples.

must admit that I have often used br for presentation. Good point.

[...]In the Bad Old Days, authors would use b and i to emphasise words.
In the Equally Bad Modern Days, authors use strong and em to make text boldfaced or italic.

again, been using b and i to emphasize text. Will now use strong and em!

[...] The most common "feature" that beginners ask about is the target attribute for links [...] The reason for deprecating those items is that the W3C wants to promote the separation between content (HTML), presentation (CSS) and behaviour (JavaScript)

haaaa, makes sense!



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