Validating Your Website

If you’re keen on making sure your website code is perfect, then make sure you give the W3C’s HTML and CSS validator’s a try. These free web-based tools allow you to check whether your HTML and CSS files conform to the W3C specifications.

The W3C HTML validator allows you to check any online web page or upload an offline HTML page, and will return a detailed list of where your page does not conform to standards.

The W3C CSS validator can check that you have written valid CSS in external CSS stylesheets.

Finally, the W3C Broken Links report will check for any broken links.

If you’re HTML is in a mess (!!!), check out HTMLTidy, which is available both as a web based service and as a Firefox extension. HTMLTidy will remove any empty tags, correct simple errors and indent code nicely to make it more readable.

You can make one web page look and feel differently over many different media types by using the media attribute inside the link element when referring to an external stylesheet.

For example, we are used to linking to a stylesheet using the following syntax:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
             href="/library/css/style.css" />

By including a media attribute, we can limit this stylesheet to a particular media type. For example:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
             href="/library/css/style.css" media="screen" />

Potentially, this allows us to format our site differently depending on how the user is viewing the page.

Getting traffic to your website can be difficult. But keeping visitors can be even tougher. Visitor’s are more likely to revisit your website if they have a good experience. Here’s just a few items to consider in order to improve your visitor’s experience to your website. No doubt we’ll run a second article on user experience soon!

This week’s tech tool is actually a JavaScript file that makes loading Flash content onto your HTML pages incredibly easy.

SWFObject (or SWF Fix as some of you may still know it by) can detect the Flash plug-in for all major web browsers and is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully and creates valid HTML.

According to Smashing Magazine, the days of Web 2.0 shiny websites are coming to an end, as trends begin moving sites toward a grunge look and feel.

In a recent article, Smashing Magazine show how you can make your website look more organic, and life-like using a few simple grunge textures, colours and fonts.

While I can see personal sites, and portfolio websites moving toward this style, can anyone really see a corporation such as Apple, Sainsbury’s or Orange changing their websites to a grunge look and feel?

While some companies already offer amazing and fast loading video quality at a price, for the regular user YouTube’s video quality is average at best. This is set to change, however, with the arrival of new higher quality video formats at YouTube.

There are two new formats being introduced, known as format 6 and format 18. Eventually there will be a link to switch between the formats on the YouTube video page as there are for a restricted number of files already, but currently you will need to suffix your (newer) videos’ query string with either &fmt=6 or &fmt=18. The difference in video settings is as follows:

Unfortunately, there is currently no easy way to embed these new video formats into a web page. But rest assured, as soon as there is, we’ll let you know!

Following on from last week’s Online Portfolio post, this Flash based portfolio website for  art/design company White Void is an interesting design.

Check it out!

Smashing Magazine has a very useful article to help all you freelancers (or otherwise) create an amazing online portfolio.

The article details the pitfalls to avoid, and offers 12 points to consider in order to make an effective design. Check it out!

(Image taken from Marius Roosendaal’s portfolio)

I often get asked by budding web developers what the difference is between HTML and XHTML. The truth is, there isn’t a lot of difference between HTML 4.01 and XHTML, and most of the rules of XHTML you should be using regardless to maintain tidier code. So, if you already know HTML 4 through and through, just bear in mind the following points and you can put XHTML on your CV/resume too!

Microsoft have released the first Beta of their next generation browser, Internet Explorer 8, available to download here. At a presentation at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas, after demoing Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft surprised it’s audience by announcing that the first beta was going to be available to download straight away.

According to Microsoft, some of the key goals for Internet Explorer include complete, full CSS 2.1 support; improved scripting performance; support for HTML 5; built-in developer tools for scripting, CSS and layout debugging; “activities” and “web slices”, which are designed so that user’s can quickly see updates to their frequently checked web sites.

Give it a try here!