Does your website or blog comply with XHTML industry standards?

For many bloggers, maintaining a blog means writing new content and managing comments. There are elements of a blog far beyond average user control, such as the design, scripting, and accessibility. These key factors, however, control the quality of your platform. Your platform on the Web is almost as important as the speech you give from atop it.

One of the greatest keys to expanding your platform is your blog’s accessibility. The internet is a diverse culture of users from all walks of life. Their differences range from technological to physical and this creates a challenge when attempting to provide for the dial-up modem, aged browser version, or sight-impaired.

A quality Web designer knows how to maximize your website’s performance. For those who want an optimal platform but wish to only write new content and manage comments, hire a Web Tech.

If you’d rather learn a few simple tricks to do this yourself, read on!

HTML Tips To Aid Validation

Over the years, programmers have developed a standard for the coding languages involved in creating websites. This standard is a collaboration from talented programmers and designers, created to streamline the functionality of Web pages. It encourages Web designers to develop coding habits for increased browser compatibility and a uniform approach to Web scripting.

Valid HTML follows certain procedures. Each element of the Web page contains aspects that, when read by the server, returns information to the client in a certain way. If these elements are incorrectly coded the server is forced to slow down, attempt to understand the code, format an error, or determine how to get past the inconsistency and continue to display the content requested.

Display Valid Images

Graphics and images are powerful stimulus for your blogs content but equally powerful for the accessibility of your site when coded correctly. There are three primary requirements in every image tag.

Source
Every image requires a call to its source. This is the location of the file that should be displayed. On the internet there are a number of image types available, the most common being “.gif”, “.jpg”, and “.png”. These images are the industry standard for Web usage and should display in all image-enabled browsers.

Alternative
If a browser is not image-enabled then something needs to replace the image on the screen. This is why the alternative tag is important. Images might be turned off for any number of reasons and without an alternative the server takes a moment trying to decide what should fill that hole. For sight-impaired users the alternative provides text to describe the image or at least explain the gap in the pages text. An image alternative should offer enough information to explain the image. Remember, that the alternative text is also information search engines take into account when considering your Web pages.

Opening and Closing
Finally, every HTML tag must be closed. This is how a server knows the information for that section of the page is complete. Because an image tag is self contained it does not have a separate open and close tag like many Web page elements do which is why it can be easy to forget. Don’t forget, close your image tags.

Empowered Linkage

Another element you will use in your blog posts and website is links. A link creates text that users can click to go elsewhere, be that to other sections of your page, other pages within your blog/site, or to other sites and blogs. Some links are more complex than others but they all contain key aspects.

A link requires opening and closing tags, a destination, and clickable content. More complex links, however, might contain:

Ampersands (&)
Usually, these will be found in the querystring of a link. A querystring is additional information that is sent with the link. It is begun with a question mark followed by a label, equal sign, and value. When more than one piece of additional information is required they are tacked on with ampersands. The trouble is, when a browser loads a page the ampersand has multiple meanings. It is most commonly used to indicate a small command code that needs to be translated. Therefore, when a link requires an ampersand it is generally best to use the command code (&) rather than an actual ampersand.

Spaces ( )
Sometimes, links contain spaces, be they in a querystring or in the name of the page. Most of the time a link will work correctly by just writing the link with spaces as they appear, however, to avoid the potential for error it is better to replace empty spaces in URLs with their alternative (%20). It is best to avoid browser confusion where possible.

There Is Always More To Learn

Writing validating XHTML and HTML is a HUGE topic. There is so much more to learn and it would be impossible to cover the entire topic in a single blog post. This post highlights just two elements but I feel they’re the most important for bloggers because these two elements are used in most blog entries. Every blogger should develop the habit of ensuring their image and link tags are correctly formatted within their posts.

You can learn more about valid XHTML, HTML, and CSS in the programmers gospel, W3 Schools.

Test the validation of your own blog with W3’s Validation Service.

Hire a Web Tech to bring your site to compliance because honestly, wouldn’t you rather just be writing?