Since the inception of the world wide web consortium, the use of the lingua franca of the web or the use of HTML or XHTML had been standardised. Although standard usage of the hypertext markup language tags were regulated by W3C there are instances when these set standards are not being followed but are still capable of displaying the desired web page output. This is one of HTML’s weaknesses, the easy recognition of the tags without identifying any syntax errors. This non-identification of errors in the use of tags in your website design will in the long run would create more problems such as difficult detection of fault or errors and what seems to be a perfect web design on one browser will be horribly imperfect for the other browser. These are just some of the problems that one might encounter if proper use of tags for web design is not executed. It is therefore imperative for a website designer to know the different standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C and these are:
1. All opened tags must be closed – this means that non-empty tags or those tags that has a corresponding closing tag must always be properly closed using the said closing tag. For empty tags or tags that do not have any partner closing tag should still be closed by using the forward slash. To illustrate:
Non-empty tag: <b> </b>
Empty tag: <br/>
The proper closing of these tags is beneficial to your website design by properly identifying where a tags’ effect starts and where it ends.
2. Nest your tags properly – tag nesting is done when there are several tags used in a consecutive manner, for example in your website design you would like to highlight a certain text by underlining it and turning it into bold letters, thus, the use of the underline and bold tag are to be used or applied on a single specific target text. If such situation is encountered the proper nesting rule to follow is that the first tag to be opened will be the last tag to be closed.
3. Use lowercase letters in your tag name – in HTML, the practice was the use of uppercase letters in naming the tag, i.e. <B> -for bold. A recent W3C standard now dictates that lowercase should be followed in naming the tags instead of the uppercase letters. This is also attributed to the fact that DHTML and XML is added in the field of Website design and to make web pages universal the use of lowercase should be practiced.
For more information on our ethical website design, and search engine optimisation services, please contact us today.
Tags: Web Design Tag Standards
