Shawn Morton seems to know well XHTML. He proved it on the different projects he achieved successfully.
Anyway, back to the subject, Shawn created a Dreamweaver template (surely not a problem to adapt for Visual Studio) to help apprehending all basic aspects of XHTML.
His website (blog ??) use this template. Lot of nice things indeed. Well now I let Shawn explain himself the content of the zip file:
Over the past year, I’ve been involved in the redesign of a lot of web sites. Depending on how the sites were originally created, some redesigns were easier than others; however, most of them were still more difficult and time-consuming than they needed to be.
As a result, I made a New Year’s resolution to start using XHTML and CSS2 exclusively when building or rebuilding web sites. Not only do XHTML and CSS2 result in cleaner, more efficient code, but they also improve accessibility and scalability.
I created this Dreamweaver template to help designers and developers make the leap into XHTML and CSS2. I hope that it demonstrates how much easier XHTML and CSS2 sites are to build and maintain.
Here are a few of the benefits of using this template:
1. It is XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant By making the leap straight to XHTML 1.0 Strict (versus moving to XHTML 1.0 Transitional), there will be no need to go back and rework your code.
2. It is CSS2 compliant The layout of this template is CSS2-driven, so presentation is completely separate from the content. There are no TABLE tags and no spacer GIFs.
3. It meets all of Section 508’s guidelines for web accessibility There are currently 16 guidelines that have been specified for the accessibility of web sites and web-based applications. This template complies with all 16.
4. It is cross-browser compatible with Internet Explorer, Netscape and Opera The template works perfectly in the latest versions of the major browsers and it degrades gracefully in the older ones.
5. It is small and loads quickly The code, style sheets and graphics all weigh in at around 18Kb.
As much as I love this template, there are a couple things to be aware of before getting started:
1. Coding with the DWT file Because the template is so dependent on external style sheets, you can’t really get a sense of what the page will actually look like when working in Dreamweaver’s “Design View;” therefore, I find it best to edit it in “Code View.”
2. Mobile browsers This template will not work if you are developing pages for mobile browsers such as Pocket Internet Explorer. Pocket IE is based on HTML 3.01, so XHTML and external style sheets just won’t work.
If Pocket IE is one of your target browsers, you can add the following OS detect code to the template. It allows you to redirect Pocket IE users to a compatible page.
<script type="text/javascript"> if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Windows CE") != -1) {window.location='pocketpc.html'}="BR"></script>="/FONT">
If you have any questions or comments regarding this template, post them to the discussion below or e-mail me directly.
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