If you’ve been doing web design for the past few years and just recently learned about web standards, welcome. Let’s get started.

• What’s CSS
• XHTML
• W3C Validation
• Get Started!

What’s CSS?
What happens when you say to someone, ‘I do web development’? Their answer is, “Yeah, I learned that h… t… m… l…. once.” Well good for them, they know how to make tables… with frontpage. Why am I telling you this? Well because people think that HTML is the design language of them web. Wrong. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets that allows an xhtml page of content to be formatted. CSS is the design language of the web, while HTML or XHTML is the content language of the web.

XHTML
What is XHTML? What is the difference between HTML and XHTML. Web browsers allow web developers to write sloppy html. Just like the english language, HTML has grammar. When HTML is written sloppilly, the browser tries to figure out what the writer was trying to say, and then guesses. Each browser has a different guess which makes the exact same page show up different in each browser. XHTML compliant pages use grammatically correct HTML.

More questions about XHTML? Check out w3.org.

W3C Validation
W3C validation is how XHTML checkts to see if it is strictly compliant. It’s just like taking your English paper to your teacher, and she tells you everything that is wrong with it and what to fix. By checking to make sure your page is W3C compliant, you have officially accepted web standards.

Get Started!
Start using web standards!
Here are some links to get started:

• 9rules
• A List Apart
• Stop Design
• Digital Web Magazine
• Simple Bits

Still debating the fact of whether or not CSS is worthwhile. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets that allows an xhtml page of content to be formatted. An example you say? Check out www.cssvault.com.

Going from pure flash sites to pure CSS sites is quite an overhaul. Taken the fact that Flash is completely ‘on-the-fly’ versus the static nature of css, it will be hard to decide which is better. Conforming to universal standards is always a plus, such as the W3 standards of CSS.

Right now the main plus of CSS is fast, and I mean uber-fast content. Secondly, any browser can view the content. Thirdly, you can proclaim yourself a CSS God when finished (a few years back I claimed myself to be linux god as well…)

Well here goes my live test of CSS in the working world…