The university authors its pages using semantic based (x)HTML for content and cascading style sheets formating.
(x)HTML basics
XHTML is the standard markup language for web documents and the successor to HTML 4 - a more structured version of the language we all know and love. Here are the new rules:
- Select a DOCTYPE
- Your document must start with a DOCTYPE to tell the browser how to interpret the page. Our template takes care of this, but you can read A List Apart's Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE! for more information.
- All tags must be in lowercase
- Unless you code by hand, this is tricky. Usually it involves a setting in FrontPage or Dreamweaver.
- Quote any attribute values
- For example,
width=55should bewidth="55". - Close all tags (including empty tags)
- Every tag (such
as
<p>,<li>, et al.) must be followed by a tag (</p>,</li>, etc.) that contains the element. You can still nest tags, but the inner tags must be closed before the outer ones. Tags like<br />and<hr />use slashes to close themselves.
The newer versions of FrontPage and Dreamweaver validate to ensure these rule have been followed, but you can also use the W3C's validator to test compliance.
Cascading style sheets
HTML was never meant to specify formatting, only to describe the contents of the document. Elements such as <font> <b> and <i> were hacks by browser companies to pacify demands for more complex formatting. In the near future, web developers will no longer be using these tags to format text.
The preferred way to specify the presentation of text uses cascading style sheets (CSS), a separate specification from HTML, which is much more sophisticated for specifying document presentation. Those styles can be reused to save time and bandwidth.
Our styles
Our basic style sheet applies the layout and formatting for this page:
- Page width with a columns for navigation and content
- Header and navigation column colour
- Font sizes for headlines and body text
Other style sheets are available to change the colour of the header and navigation.
Resources
The Roadmap to Standards includes many resources for learning CSS file creation. From the list, our office particularly recommends (and might lend you) these books:
- Designing with Web Standards - Jeffery Zeldman
- Designing CSS Web Pages - Christopher Schmidt
- Web Standards Solutions - Dan Cedarholm
- Cascading Style Sheets, the Definitive Guide - Eric Meyer
Our office can also help you modify the templates.