mea culpa

[DuaneJackson]

Up until now, I've pretty much always done sites with tables for layout and not worried to much about compliance. Fortunately for the world at large I don't do too much coding of user-side HTML

I have been a very, very naughty boy and I'm sorry.

From now on I am determoned that anything new that I work on will be in XHTML/CSS and only use tables for tabular data.

What standards should a XHTML web site comply to at a minimum? Is XHTML/CSS the best way to go? What online validators do you use?

Comments, thoughts, URLs and tools appreciated.

[NS]

http://validator.w3.org/ that's pretty much the standard one that is used but I know that there are others for content and accessability.

Like you I am moving away from tables to XHTML and converting a number of existing sites into XHTML and already they are moving up search engines and are quicker to load.

[MSOMedia]

Since I started designing websites under the MSO Media name I've used XHTML and CSS. It's definitely the way to go, because it means you have the option to change the colour scheme and layout of a page at the drop of a hat, without having to make changes to each HTML page.

It also means you can start being quite clever and having one CSS for browsers and another for print, so you don't need separate "Printer friendly" pages. The browser will simply use the correct CSS file. There are tons of funky tricks you'll discover once you start delving into it.

I'd definitely try getting into the habbit of writing your code by hand. Dreamweaver's quite good for that, because it gives you the dropdown hints and completes tags for you etc.

You can take a look at how much CSS can transform a well-written site by visiting www.csszengarden.com (http://www.csszengarden.com). The idea is that you get a HTML file which you can't change, but you can rewrite the CSS.

Good luck with it!

[MichaelG]

Umm - We use XHTML/CSS and tables (where necessary). The issue we sometime encounter with XHTML/CSS is browser compatibility - and believe me, sometimes using tables is the only way to save time. XHTML/CSS or not - end users don't really care - to them its just another website.

Have a play: http://www.creotec.com/mycss/

For tools: All code done with textpad
We test on: IE/Firefox/Safari
Validation: w3.org

I hear the latest version of dreamweaver and fireworks can now produce good XHTML/CSS - so give that a go

You might also want to read:
CSS Cookbook By Christopher Schmitt
Publisher : O'Reilly
Pub Date : August 2004
ISBN : 0-596-00576-8

And to see nice css websites: http://www.cssdrive.com

[DuaneJackson]

Thanks guys,

The first step is getting the company site compliant, so I've bought the latest version of Dreamweaver and made a good start on it.

D.