Whew.  Well with the May 1st Reboot underway (see my entry here) I've been trying to clean up my site and coding to get it 100% compliant with web standards.  The three main standards I'm working with right now include XHTML, CSS, and RSS.  When coding a site you have to meet certain standards.  Well, you don't have to meet them, but it is good practice and shows your visitors your commitment to non-sloppy coding.

Everything has standards.  Just look at your car for instance.  Gas pedal on the right with the brake pedal to the left of it.  That's a standard that car manufacturers have to follow when creating cars.  Can you imagine if we didn't have standards?  Your gas and brake pedals could be reversed, the electrical plug on your new toaster may not in the wall outlet.  Madness I tell you, madness!

The same goes with web designing.  If people didn't follow web design standards then your site could become completely inaccessible to a lot of visitors.  Creating the site can be fun and easy, but then getting your site to meet the standards can be a bitch, my case in point.

While this site has been up and running now for a while it would never pass any validation tests.  Sure the site worked and looked ok, but it still did not meet a lot of web standards.  I wanted to start by getting my CSS file validated (you can validate your CSS file here) and that was pretty simple.  Just a few tweaks here and there and I was good.  I then decided to work with XHTML.  I was going to try and get my site to work with XHTML 1.1 but I really don't like a lot of those standards.  For instance the "target" attribute inside the "a" (anchor) tag is no longer supported.  That "target" attribute is used to tell your browser how to open a link you click on.  Should it open on the same page, or a new window, etc.  But looking at XHTML 1.0 Traditional seemed to work out better.  As I'm writing this I'm still not meeting the XHTML standard, but I'm getting close (same with RSS).

Anyways, I'm going through all this extra hassle just to try and be more professional.  A lot of people can build you a web site, but can those people also make it comply with all web design standards?  I've added links at the bottom of my site that you can use to see if and how my site validates.