WebDev Links

Here are some good reads having to do with webstandards, Doctypes,

via Zeldman

The Business Benefits of Web Standards
A few managers at a few specific departments at purdue could do themselves some good by reading this article. It covers a lot of really smart reasons for developing your websites according to the standards laid forth by the World Wide Web Consortium

Search engine agents crawl the web to index it. Compared to human beings, there are very significant differences in how search engines operate. Dynamic effects such as those created by JavaScript are not taken into account, and text rendered with graphics cannot be read and parsed either. Separating presentation from content increases the information/markup ratio, making CSS-based documents more pertinent with regard to the search terms, which makes them rank higher in search results.

That almost confirms my stance on Javascript and screen readers. Can anyone confirm or deny if screen readers discard or process javascript?

Fixing Your Size With The Right DOCTYPE This article covers the who what and why of DOCTYPES. It also contains a list of valid doctypes, a rare and valuable thing to have as a web developer (unless of course you’re spoiled by text editors like HTMLkit ).

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Per HTML and XHTML standards, a DOCTYPE (short for “document type declaration”) informs the validator which version of (X)HTML you’re using, and must appear at the very top of every web page. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages: your markup and CSS won’t validate without them.

As mentioned in previous ALA articles (and in other interesting places), DOCTYPES are also essential to the proper rendering and functioning of web documents in compliant browsers like Mozilla, IE5/Mac, and IE6/Win.

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FYI, this site conforms to the XHTML 1.1 standard and is distributed as application/xhtml+xml to those browsers who can handle it (gecko).

Here’s another list of valid DTDs straight from the horse’s mouth.

P.S. In case you hadn’t heard, Zeldman has a new book out, Designing for Web Standards