“Most people have encountered truly ‘bratty’ Web pages in their Websurfing careers†ó misbehaving pages that cause browser errors ranging from an abrupt termination to a complete system lockup. Almost invariably, these ill-behaved pages contain embedded HTML errors, or else they make extensive use of non-standard, browser-specific, quasi-HTML syntax. Regular and consistent use of HTML validators helps to identify and eliminate the embedded HTML errors that make for a bratty Web page.”

“QuirksMode.org is the personal and professional site of Peter-Paul Koch, freelance web developer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It contains more than 150 pages with CSS and JavaScript tips and tricks, and is one of the best sources on the WWW for studying and defeating browser incompatibilities.”

“What’s allowable in XHTML 1.0 Transitional but not permitted in XHTML 1.0 Strict? Peter-Paul Koch asked about comparison lists the other day in his exceptional XHTML-L discussion list. I’ve listed three of my favorites below. I found these concise and easy to quickly find what you need. I’ve added short descriptions to each of the links…”

“Here is a set of tables containing the 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, as described in section 24 of the official HTML 4 specifications, published by the W3C. I have divided them into my own, hopefully logical, categories.”

Textile makes smart quotes, em dashes, ellipses, trademarks and other entities.

“This Style Guide for the Branch Libraries of the New York Public Library explains the markup and design requirements for all Branch Libraries web projects, along with various standards and best practices. Branch Libraries projects must be authored in valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and styled with valid Cascading Style Sheets.”

“I’ve worked with Flash for several years and have always been slightly dissatisfied with the markup needed to embed a movie in web pages. When I recently published a site in XHTML, my dissatisfaction with the markup grew as I realized that it simply wasn’t valid in this context and was bloating my pages to unacceptable levels. A leaner, standards-compliant method of embedding Flash movies was called for.”

“Over the years, HTML has only become bigger, never smaller, because new versions had to maintain backward compatibility. That’s about to change. On 5 August 2002, the first working draft of XHTML 2.0 was released and the big news is that backward compatibility has been dropped; the language can finally move on. So, what do you as a developer get in return? How about robust forms and events, a better way to look at frames and even hierarchical menus that don’t require massive amounts of JavaScript.”

“Of primary concern to some Web developers is the W3C’s warning that XHTML 2.0 will not be ‘backward compatible’ with HTML 4.0 and XHTML 1.0. That alert has raised concern that billions of existing Web pages risk obsolescence unless they are translated to the new Web language.”

“The World Wide Web Consortium has issued a series of standards for XHTML, a new version of HTML as a version of XML. Does this mean every Web designer and developer must learn XHTML? What are the benefits? What happens if you don’t? To get answers to these questions, FTPOnline Editor-in-Chief Tim Haight spoke with Molly Holzschlag, a Web designer, educator, writer, consultant, and member of the steering committee of The Web Standards Project.”

“Separation of content from presentation, blah blah. We’re yelling about it more than ever these days, thanks to folks like the Web Standards Project and the hope that the world will soon be filled with small, fast, beautiful web browsers that let you do anything with data from the web, anywhere. In the crusade for this holy chalice, there has, as with all crusades, been declared a common enemy, or a witch to hunt, if you will. The unholy enemy? Using <table> elements as the layout grid for complex web designs.”

“January 26th, 2001 marked the first birthday of XHTML 1.0 as the official W3C recommendation for Web markup. But XHTML has yet to toddle, yet to smile, and yet to cry loud enough to get the attention of most Web designers.”

“So what exactly is XHTML 1.0 and what does it mean to the Web developer? I’ll start with the W3C’s description: XHTML 1.0 is a reformulation of HTML as an XML application. This means that if you’re authoring a document in XHTML 1.0, you are applying the rules and concepts inherent to XML to your Web markup. The dangling question naturally is: Can XHTML 1.0 be used to mark up my Web documents today? The answer is a resounding ‘yes!’ All you need to do is learn how to structure documents properly, choose the correct document type definition (DTD) for your needs, and learn a few new ways of managing your code development.”

“Learn DHTML and JavaScript concepts quickly and create dynamic web pages the easiest way. Get free code with complete instructions on how to use them.”

“This service uses a generic webdata transformation service (an XSLT server) to convert from a dialect of XHTML to the proposed RSS 1.0 channel format. Goal: author in XHTML, syndicate in RSS. …Specifically, we provide a Web form that you can use to turn certain kinds of HTML document into the proposed RSS 1.0 channel / syndication format. This approach is designed to free content authors from the technical detail of evolving formats such as RSS, WAP/WML, RDF etc. Instead of learning dozens of new acronyms, content creators can produce XHTML documents, and have software tools do the rest.”