Most webmasters are designing for IE (Internet Explorer) 6, which is not as W3C standards compliant as is FireFox, Netscape, Safari and Opera. Designers hopefully remember that web browsers are not all compliant, because a web page that looks great in Internet Explorer might be a wreck in FireFox or Netscape. With the wave of devices for internet applications, compliance with W3C standards is even more critical. Webpage Templates, WordPress Themes and Flash Templates must all be fully validated.

With the release of IE 7 for Windows XP, which is much more standards compliant, some web pages that look okay IE 6 might look different in IE 7. (Well , now, there you go again!) Microsoft has made serious efforts to make the browser compliant to W3C standards and compatible with CSS(Cascading Style Sheets). CSS interpretation, by recommendation of W3C, has been improved tremendously which gives designers more ability to create functionality in trans-browser design.

Microsoft says they are taking W3C compatibility seriously. So, if you are designing pages without checking them in W3C Standards Compliant browsers, you may be in for hard times with IE 7. You must incorporate W3C Web standards into design strategy. (Well, do I have to ask?)

Webpage Templates, even WordPress Themes and Flash Template designs, need to be seen in a browser like FireFox, which is backed by Google marketing. Prior to IE 4.x, Netscape was the leading browser with nearly 80% of the market. Microsoft took it’s opportunity however, and now controls most of the browser market. (See, and this is how it happens - yes, you knew it.)

Folks, there are a lot of webpages out there that are not standards compliant. If strict W3C standards were enforced in browsers a lot of sites would need major redesign. (A new specialty would be born - Webpage Standards Rehabilitation Therapist.)

If designers will observe W3C standards and incorporate CSS compatibility into their sites they should be more functional for a longer time. To work on CSS capability you need the Web Developer Extension for FireFox and the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. These are very helpful for creating and troubleshooting Web pages.

After completing your design use a MarkUp Validation Service to check whether your Web page conforms to W3C recommendations. If there are errors, the validator will notify you of them and suggest corrections. Also, remember that when you observe W3C standard guidelines many of the code(tags) that were valid in the “Pre-Standards” era have depreciated and may be ignored completely by browsers. So, if you ignore these errors during validation, your web pages may not render correctly. (Don’t be foolish!)

In some instances you may not be able to validate HTML or XHTML at 100%. So you want to put this DOCTYPE declaration into your document at the top of your web page just before the tag:

< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

This “Document Type Definition” or DTD supplies various browsers with the needed information as to which (X)HTML specification your web page is designed by. This instructs the Browser to render the page correctly. A complete list of recommended DTDs can be found at the W3C Website. If you don’t add the DOCTYPE browsers will switch to a “quirks mode,” so it is important to include this DOCTYPE declaration on each web page that you make for it to be rendered correctly. If your Web pages render well in FireFox at present you probably will not encounter any major problems in IE 7 other than minor adjustments here and there.

Gninworb Ruhtra spelled backwords,
Arthur Browning