HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Some of the more popular HTML and web page editors have been around
for many years. Some of these programs have been acquired by other com-
panies with diferent programming styles and marketing objectives than the
original developers. he WYSIWYG HTML editor Dreamweaver is a case in
point. It was initially released in 1997 by Macromedia, which was acquired
ten years later by Adobe, which bundled Dreamweaver into its Creative Suite
product along with Adobe's premiere applications, Photoshop and Illustrator.
he sotware developers at these two companies had diferent styles of coding,
and the result is a mix of legacy and newer code.
Because Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator are de facto standards for graphic
design and development (they are routinely listed as requirements in many job
ofers), Dreamweaver is widely used. However, because of the economics of the
shrink-wrapped sotware business, in which a sotware upgrade may require
operating system updates, which may require hardware upgrades, many devel-
opers forgo the hassle and expense and continue to use older versions that do
not create optimized or even valid code. But their pages still look great—at
least to clients who don't know what to look for under the hood.
Let's face it—we all make mistakes. hankfully, web browsers are very for-
giving, and they try to ix most coding errors. But even if our mistakes are
ignored and have no efect on the presented page, they are still mistakes and
may afect future changes to a page. hat is why HTML and CSS validation
services exist. he World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization
responsible for drating the recommendation for HTML standards. It pro-
vides an HTML validation service at http://validator.w3.org/. You can ind
other validation services by doing an Internet search. he W3C's validator is
verbose. It inds every missing quote and angle bracket in a page. Input to the
validator can either be a page at a public URL, a ile uploaded from your local
PC, or text entered into the input form.
Validating a web page takes very little time and is essential. Ater all,
because anyone can run any page through a validator, the quality of your
work is always open to direct inspection and evaluation. If you use a web page
editor with a built-in syntax checker, you can ind and ix minor errors as you
develop the page. It is not diicult to create error-free web pages.
If you are running a blog, I recommend using a validator before publish-
ing a post or updating a page. he preview can be saved on your local PC for
upload into the validator. his will prevent errors in a post that may not be
