XHTML & CSS services

XHTML (eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language) is the language that web pages are built with. It defines the structure: headings, paragraphs, different page divisions, and so on.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the way that XHTML pages are formatted to make them look good: colours, font styles, positioning, and so on.

Together, they’re part of the basis of the web.

I’ve been working with them for over 10 years, and besides being an essential part of my general web work (such as building sites with WordPress), I also enjoy creating XHTML/CSS templates as part of a team. I get the Photoshop files from a designer, create the templates, and hand them over to a developer.

My good design sense and excellent experience in server-side development mean that I’m well-placed to act effectively in this intermediary role, communicating easily at each stage of the process.

Web standards

All my XHTML/CSS work is based on a solid knowledge of the standards that the W3C have set for these languages. Adhering to these standards is the foundation on which all the other aspects of good web pages are built: maintainability (the code can be updated easily in the future), portability (it works reasonably well in all sorts of browsing devices), accessibility (it facilitates browsing for people with various impairments), and search engine optimization (the content is indexed easily by search engines and is well-placed to rank highly in their results).

Semantic markup

Web pages can adhere to standards in letter, but fall short of their spirit. The spirit is basically down to making sure that the code is structured in a meaningful (i.e. semantic) way. For the most part this means that the code is structured, labelled and commented in a way that makes it easy for other developers to understand and work with it. This aids both maintainability and teamwork.

Accessibility

Accessibility is a broad topic, covering everything from making sure that a page is easily readable by screen reading software for the blind to helping those who can’t use a mouse by offering useful keyboard shortcuts.

My code, through adhering to web standards, always provides a good base level of accessibility, usually achieving “Double-A” conformance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. Hitting “Triple-A” usually involves less technical, more content-oriented considerations, and I’m happy to work with content producers to achieve this.

WCAG 2.0 became a W3C Recommendation in December 2008, and I’ve not yet got up to speed with this. Again, for any projects where accessibility is a high priority, I’d be glad to work to hit the right guidelines.

Hand-coding

I code by hand. Of course I use a good editor to speed things up with shortcuts and so on. But I find that making XHTML work most effectively and elegantly with CSS (not to mention PHP and WordPress code) usually requires a level of attention to detail and lateral thinking that WYSIWYG code-generating packages just can’t provide.