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Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)

We recommend using HTML 4.01 when writing HTML pages. This latest standard from www.w3.org distances the content of web pages from their formatting. We do not use tags to make text red, rather we tag text as requiring emphasis and pass the formatting decision to a style definition.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Style sheets define how content is rendered on a page. A style can be defined independently from a tag and associated with any number of tags by using the "id" or "class" attribute. This makes tags such as <font> redundant. We use the CCS-Positioning defined in CSS2 to allow users to interact with dynamically positioned content. This is particulary important when producing DHTML that is compatible with Navigator 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0 and upwards.

Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language (XHTML)

XHTML 1.0 is HTML 4.01 reformulated using the more rigid rules of XML, but with the flexibility to be extended to cope with future browser enhancements. We recommend writing HTML that is as far as possible XHTML compliant. Namely:
  • correctly nesting tags
  • ensure use of end tags that are optional under HTML. eg '<p />'
  • use of lower case tags
  • quoting attribute values
  • giving all attributes explicit values eg checked='checked'.
  • reference style sheets and JavaScript from files
  • use of 'id' attribute in preference to 'name'.

JavaScript

When a browser loads an HTML page the elements within the page can be referenced using the browser's Document Object Model (DOM). Unfortunately there are significant differences between the DOM for Navigator 4 and Explorer 4. To overcome these problems we recommend using a series of JavaScript objects to define an API that is browser independent. For a full description of these issues see www.dansteinman.com.