H401 - Review Questions Week 1
- Even though the W3C can only recommend standards, we know that they are important. Briefly describe what you perceive as the important reason(s) to follow the W3C guidelines.
Standards are important because they're, well, standard. In order to ensure that our pages are consistent across all browsers, web developers and user agent developers all must follow the standards. Otherwise, our websites would be unpredictable. Each browser could render elements differently, and a site that looks great in a web developer's preferred browser would look great, but in others it could be completely different.
Also, if your website follows the standards of today, user agents of the future should still display the sites properly. If you declare a page as XHTML 1.0, future browsers will know how to render your page, even if XML 5.0 is the current expected standard. - Name five differences between HTML and XHTML.
- All tags must be closed, and they must be closed in the proper order
- All atributes must have values, and those values must be enclosed in quotes
- Tags and attributes must be lowercase, and values are case sensitive
- Every page must have a DOCTYPE, an XML namespace, a head, and a body
- Certain characters, such as must be escaped, so & becomes &
- What does XHTML allow you to do that HTML doesn't? How could this be beneficial to your Web site?
XHTML allows you to define your own elements in your own XML namespace. This could allow you to better structure your document with elements instead of classes and IDs. This also helps begin to bridge the jump to XML.
- What, in your opinion, are some difficulties Web authors face in designing across platforms and browsers? How could XHTML help in this area?
The main difficulty I see is the way user agents render pages. Mobile agents have difficulty rendering the detailed HTML pages (mostly because the HTML specification is so complex (at least earlier ones). XHTML ensures that you have a well formed page, that any user agent can properly parse, and it should display properly provided the user agent follows the standards.