Web Page Standards

Web standards make it easier for everyone to use the internet. They ensure that sites work across all browsers, are censor-free and accessible to people with disabilities.

They will continue to work as new technology emerges. This means that websites built with web standards will display properly on iPhones, Droids and other devices which greatly expand the viewing audience.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

CSS allows web pages to be formatted with a single set of rules. This approach shortens coding time and makes it easier to maintain the appearance of your site. For example, if you have a group of product pages that need the same look and feel, one set of formatting rules can be applied to all those HTML documents.

CSS is part of the foundation that makes up web programming alongside HTML and JavaScript. It defines the way your page looks and determines colors, shapes and sizes of elements on your website.

You can define your style information in an external CSS file, which you then link to your html document using the link> tag. In some cases, you can also include style information within an HTML tag — this is known as internal styling. When you use both external and internal styles, the later ones override the earlier ones based on the cascading rule.

DOM (Document Object Model)

The DOM allows JavaScript programs to access and manipulate web page content, structure, and style dynamically. This allows pages to be updated without reloading them and to respond to user actions instantly.

Programmers can use the DOM to build documents, navigate their structure and add, change, or delete elements and data. With a few exceptions, anything found in an HTML or XML document can be accessed, altered, changed, or deleted using the DOM.

The DOM is an object model that provides a set of interfaces for managing HTML and XML documents. It is language independent; it may be implemented using language-independent systems such as COM or CORBA, or using language-specific bindings like the Java or ECMAScript bindings specified in this specification.

XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language)

In the early years of the Web, HTML was developed with a fairly flexible syntax. This flexibility allowed for some leniency in coding, but as the Web became more sophisticated, it was seen as important to have a well-structured format that would be easy for machines to process. This is why XHTML was developed.

XHTML is based on XML, which has strict rules about structure. As a result, XHTML documents are guaranteed to look the same in all browsers that support it. It also has a more robust set of features, such as support for more character encodings and a requirement that tags must be closed.

Despite these advantages, XHTML has not completely eliminated the need to test and use hacks in order to ensure that your website looks the same across different browsers. This has largely been due to the fact that browsers are still prone to tolerating and interpreting invalid markup code. However, this is slowly changing with the introduction of newer browsers that can correctly parse XHTML.

HTML5 (HyperText Markup Language)

Unlike the visual formatting elements of CSS, HTML tags specify the default characteristics of text in web pages. These characteristics can then be modified by the designer using CSS.

While previous versions of HTML focused on the markup needed to display text and images, the current version adds many new semantic tags like header>, main>, section>, nav> and aside>. It also adds video> and audio> tags to support rich media and new inline semantics such as address> and time>.

HTML5 discourages non-meaningful markup and provides strict XML serialization (which can be used with well-formed XHTML). It also supports the canvas> tag, which creates a canvas on which web designers can draw JavaScript-based graphics. This allows developers to separate design and content, which simplifies website maintenance and redesign. Additionally, it addresses compatibility issues with mobile devices and assistive technologies such as screen readers that suppress styling and boost text magnification and contrast. It also enables local web storage and application caching.

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