Doctype: HTML Version Declared

January 25, 2013 Jeff — No Comments

What is Doctype and why do I care?

Doctype declares what and how a browser should rending a webpage.It is because of this that it should be the first tag on your webpage … and it should be included always!

A bit of emphasis is added there because declaring the it is a very important starting point to communication on the web. In email code development it was easy to somethimes skate by without it until ISPs (internet service providers) started to use not having it declared as a queue for spam … lesson learned.

Knowing how to use Doctype’s can actually really cool, especially with HTML5. With HTML5 you can simply declare the it and then the browser will read html tags that are depracated for HTML 4.01 and XHTML STRICT and fix basic HTML Code issues such as if a tag wasn’t closed.

Further reading on Doctypes with W3C Schools

Code Samples: Doctype

<!DOCTYPE html>
<!-- This is HTML 5-->

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<!-- This is HTML 4.01 Transitional -->

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<!-- This is XHTML 1.0 Strict -->

CSS: The Look of the Web

January 25, 2013 Jeff — No Comments

Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, as described us

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is what is known as the look of the web. More formerly, CSS is used for describing the the look of a document written in a markup language such as HTML. It is most commonly used for HTML but it can also be used for XML documents, including plain XML, SVG and XUL.

Digging Deeper: CSS separates the document from the markup including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility for developers or editors, it can provide flexibility and control for presentation characteristics and make the visual aesthetic and user experience better in multiple customer (user) formats. CSS can also allow HTML to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices.

Web Designers and developers are constantly looking for ways to make CSS more accessible to create, use and manipulate. Now, Benevolent Giant and many other designers and developers are using frameworks suck as Bootstrap to make there work more accessible and uniform to the user as well as being able to get a lot done right out of the box. Also, pre-processing CSS languages such as .scss and .sass are gain popularity to speed up development time now that they can be compiled quickly with great products like LiveReload,CodeKit and FireApp. Check this stuff out and see if they might be useful for a project coming up for yourself.