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As the web is a constantly-evolving place, some international groups have strove to provide standards for browsers to conform to and designers to design for. HTML, the mark-up language of the web, is settling down to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards and Javascript, to a lesser degree, is also. What follows is a list of formal standards (which you should strive to follow) and de facto specifications (for designing for specific browsers but be careful). As always, be sure to consult your computing support specialist if you have any questions. HTML
  • Formal Standards
    • HTML Standards Compliance - Why Bother?, by Alan Richmond - An informal introduction to why HTML standards are good and how to go about being standards compliant.
    • W3C on HTML - Organization responsible for setting HTML standards. Technical definitions of HTML 4.01 (the newest standard) and HTML 2.0 (the minimum standard that Carleton's pages must conform to). For the quick and dirty, put a link to http://validator.w3.org/check/referer on your page and click on it - the script at that page makes sure that you don't miss anything.
    • Other HTML validators - We realize you'd like to be compliant but may not have time to do all the reading right now. In addition to the w3c tune-up page:
      • WebSiteGarage - Checks your page and send you an e-mail of problems.
      • Doctor HTML Single Page Diagnosis - Has more advanced features that you can set.

      Note: To run many of these validators, you have to include on your page a "DOCTYPE" tag to indicate which version of HTML you are trying to conform to. Some examples: 
      <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
  • De Facto Specifications
Javascript
  • Formal Standards
    • W3C on the DOM - The Document Object Model (DOM) is the basis behind the various Javascript objects on web pages. Very technical but, then again, Javascript at this level is rather technical. A must-read for Javascript developers. Currently used in IE 6+ and Netscape 6.1+ as well as many third-party browsers.
    • ECMAScript
  • De Facto Specification
    • Netscape Guide to Javascript - A useful reference for dealing with Javascript. Please note that, although Javascript 1.3 is compliant with EMCA-262, Netscape 4.x's DOM does not conform to the W3Cs.
CSS
  • Formal Standards


Last Modified: 11/23/01
by Brian Patterson