Difference between XHTML Transitional and Strict, a handy reference.
I spent a few hours yesterday doing a few things for programming piece of mind. On my fiction project, I’ve started validating html more rigorously (even going XHTML strict instead of transitional) using my Oxygen XML editor and Visibone HTML/CSS reference sheet. While fixing things, I noticed that a tracker script includes a lot of nonvalidating crap: a target=”new” and script language=”javascript and amersands not described as an html entity.
According to visibone, the language attribute was removed in favor of type=”text/javascript”, and according to Jeffrey Zeldman, there’s a way to swap doctypes at the top to allow target attribute in certain circumstances.
On another note, I tidied up my style sheets for the same project. I don’t dip into css very much (especially not in my weblog), but I actually enjoy when I get an opportunity to do so. Especially now. 2 years ago I wrote a fairly simple css file for a site, and erratic browser compliance made it impossible to get it to look right. For this reason I used some tables where I needn’t have. When I tried revising it now, I found doing so was fairly painless; I think it’s because you can pretty much count on everybody having IE 6 or Firefox. Automatic updates is good for something, no?
Looking back at my simple style sheet, I found a lot of sloppiness. I left in a lot of styles I was experimenting with, and I didn’t do much commenting, and the styles weren’t described in any order, leaving me to have to figure out what was cascading into what. Reducing clutter in css really makes it easier to see problems.