Getting Your Blogs W3C Compliant - How to Do It!

In my previous post, I mentioned about the need to start designing your pages to look good on Firefox! Firefox is a more standard compliant browser, and currently, it is taking up about 30% of the market. Moreover, Firefox is backed up by Google! So, if you want to get into good books of Google, then I guess the choice should be obvious!

So how should you go about it?

The standards recommend combining a valid CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for a look and feel with a W3C compliant XHTML web page. Combining CSS and XHTML is very powerful, and makes your website very easy to maintain. Using CSS also removes the formatting elements from the XHTML pages, and so when the search engine indexes to your site, what it get is direct content - which logically sounds better for the indexer.

Of course, I’m not saying that picking up CSS is easy, but once you become familiar with how the commands work, you will be up and running and you will never look back! Many web page design tools like the popular Dreamweaver also have support for CSS.

Web Developer tool for Firefox

A nifty tool for you to validate your website to be compliant at a click will be the Web Developer tool for Firefox. You can also use the markup validation service by W3C to check whether your web page conforms to W3C recommendations.

You will be surprised. Some tags have been depreciated long ago, but people are still using it in today’s pages.

I’ll be frank. Its tough to achieve 100% HTML or XHTML validation! This blog is in fact, not even XHTML strict! I had to insert some code from third party… and sometimes its quite a pain when they don’t provide you with good compliant code. In that case you might want to indicate that you are “currently transiting to compliance”. Put a DOCTYPE declaration in the document the top of the web pag.e

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

This tells that the web browsers how to render your page.

When you are ready for full HTML compliance, change the tag to:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">

This, then will ask the browser to be strict with your site in terms of HTML compliance. The complete list of recommended DTDs can be found at the W3C Website.

Remember, start working strict now before IE7 launches. Re-designing would be a totally time consuming process!

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