Writing a well formed post
I am finally participating in Lorelle’s Blog Challenges. The previous challenges were based on topics which I did not have a strong foundation in, as a result, I did not have the confidence of writing a post which could make a difference.
This week’s challenge enables me to become an unqualified teacher and teach about a blogging technique.
I will be teaching on How To Make Your Post Web Standards Compliant.
Why is it important to have a web standards compliant site?
Many people underestimate the necessity of conforming to web standards. In short, it not only helps in optimizing your site for search engines but also makes it a breeze to integrate into future technologies.
Choosing An Editor
There is no special software to use to create a web standards compliant post, the WordPress Admin Panel provides everything you need to get started. With that being said, I am not using the WYSIWG visual editor but the code editor.
The code editor simply displays code in contrast to the visual editor which displays content as it is (for e.g. images, embedded videos, text formatting … etc).
It is definitely less appealing than the visual editor and you will see nothing but endless lines of code. However on a positive note, it loads much faster and you have total control over what you write in your post, so it is in your hands to create a web standards compliant post.
A prerequisite for using the code editor is to have very basic HTML knowledge. A good place to start learning would be W3 Schools.
Good Markup
The only way to ensure that you create a web standards compliant post would be to use good markup. A good example of a good markup for the img tag would be to include the alt and title. There are way too many tags which deserves a mention to watch out for in XHTML 1.0 Strict, I will leave that for your own exploration.
When writing, it is always good to preview the entry as you progress to minimize any errors you might encounter when you are about to click the publish button. Take me for instance, I could click the preview button a large number of times for a certain entry just to ensure that there are no presentation problems.
Validation
Last but not least, I can’t stress this enough.
Validate your post, W3C provides a free validation service where you can check your markup against the standard.
If there are no errors, that kudos to you! You have done a great job. Don’t worry if there are errors, just fix them and there you have it; a clean looking web standards compliant post.
Good start and thanks for taking my blog challenge on (finally).
You started out great, but did leave out some of the most important parts to make your site compliant with web standards and that’s the accessibility standards. This includes writing links with the “title” text attribute which describes the link, and using the ALT attribute in image tags to describe the image - which most people use to write a caption which is wrong. It must describe the image for those who cannot see it.
Validating your code, though, seems to be a dying part of web development. People don’t think about how one misspelled HTML tag or bit of code can stop a web page from loading or search engine from indexing your site. Excellent reminder on that!
Good job! I expect more of these now.
Thank you for pointing out what I missed. Yet another lesson learnt!
With regards to the alt attribute in img tags, XHTML 1.0 Strict requires it to be inputed to be validated. As such, I always add the title and alt attributes to describe my image.
The same can be said for the link tag where I add a title attribute. I didn’t know these fell upon as accessibility standards and not web standards.