1.0 Coding Standards
This site is designed to the XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS2.1 specifications as laid down by the WC3(World Wide Web Consortium). All new pages must be validated against the above mentioned specifications.
Useful Links :
DOCTYPE
XHTML 1.0 Strict requires that every (X)HTML page on the site must start with the following DOCTYPE declaration:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">All pages should use the Unicode UTF-8 character set.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">Special Characters
All special characters should be marked up using the correct named entity or Unicode equivalent in order for the page to display correctly across browsers and to validate. In particular, use the following codes for common special characters:
| Name | Symbol | Code |
Ampersand |
& |
& |
Left Double Quote |
“ |
“ |
Right Double Quote |
” |
” |
Less Than |
< |
< |
Greater Than |
> |
> |
en-dash |
- |
&endash; |
em-dash |
– |
&emdash; |
Ellipsis |
… |
&helip; |
Links
The text within links should be unique and describe the destination of the link. Links saying “Click Here” or “More” should be avoided.
<a href="news.php">More News Stories</a>Links that open in a new window should be avoided. However if there is a good usability reason for doing so (i.e. providing contextual help), the link text must inform the user.
<a href="help.php">Help (open new window)</a>Links to downloadable documents – such as PDF’s – should contain the document size, format and the fact that they are downloads rather than links to another page.
<a href="minutes.pdf">Download the Minutes in PDF format (25KB)</a>You can provide additional, non-critical link information in the form of a tool-tip by adding a title attribute.
<a href="news.php" title="News Archive">More News Stories</a>Tables
Tables are reserved for data and should not be used for page layout.
Web Master: Veronica Jefferson