The combination of these two design strategies is powerful in that it elicits tremendous flexibility, ease of maintenance and opens up extensive possibilities in website design. The benefits are rewarding, and every webmaster should attempt to utilize this two pronged scheme in their design routine.
Making changes to and/or styling a site designed with CSS is much easier and more elegant than messing around with a traditional table-based design.
CSS may look intimidating to a first-timer but once you familiarize with the basics you can progressively harness the power of CSS to your full benefit. In addition, most web page design tools such as Dreamweaver of FrontPage have built in modules with which you can automatically generate CSS code, which you can then view in a plain text editor for study purposes.
As a matter of fact, by installing some of the 1,500+ available FireFox extensions you can eliminate the need for quite a chunk of standalone desktop applications.
After designing your Web page remember to us 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 designing using W3C standards guidelines a lot of code(tags) that were very valid in the "Pre-Standards" era have completely depreciated and will be ignored completely by browsers. If you ignore these errors during validation, your web pages might not render correctly.
In many instances, you may never be able to achieve 100% HTML or XHTML validation. In such cases you may want put the following DOCTYPE declaration in your document -- at the top of your web page before the tag:
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" >
Note: remove space after " < " and before " > "
A "Document Type Definition" or DTD supplies Web browsers with information about which (X)HTML specification your web page is built upon, which instructs the Browser how to render the page for viewing.
In the example captioned above a standards compliant browsers will interpret your web page as an HTML 4.01 document, and because it is marked as "Transitional," it will display it in "quirks mode," meaning that the browser will forgo the strict standards mode, and display your page like it would be displayed in older "non-strict" browsers, while still supporting any tags developed after IE 4, Netscape 4 and others.
On the contrary, the following DOCTYPE declaration tells the standards compliant browsers that your web page should be displayed in strict compliance with the DOCTYPE declaration.
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" >
A complete list of recommended DTDs can be found at the W3C Website.
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