XHTML crap

I’m tired of all the incumbent use of bad HTML—being used in very bad ways.

Like, for example, people would use the <table> for making layout, and use of the <blink> tag in just about any text.

It’s really annoying, and it’s a usability/accessibility problem: people without a mouse or a keyboard may have a hard time navigating through a webpage, plus it’s a crime in human rights; what about the blind, vision-impaired, and those with physical problems like hand paralysis? Are we going to leave them in a non-internet world?

They could be suing the companies/people who own those menial websites, and, possibly, could take away your job.

Seriously, are we going to let this happen? Note: I am just echoing the voices of the professionals who are really working hard for web standards (we’ll get to this word a little later). A notable example is A List Apart, a magazine totally devoted to this craft.

If we are to act now, then we should.

Using the right tools

Instead of using HTML, we should be using a better tool: XHTML, which is basically HTML with the word eXtensible added in the front.

What the eXtensible word means is that it is being extended into a powerful language we shall call XML, an acronym which I will tell in a different post.

It has a set of rules. Below are (a few of the many) basic rules:

• All tags are in lowercase: <ul>, not <UL>
• All tags should be closed: <ul></ul>, for example. In the case of single tags like the break and image tags, add a space and a slash at their ends: <br /> and <img />
• They should be placed in an familial order, if I could call it that: <strong><em></em></strong>, not <strong><em></strong></em>

More in these next time.