HTML checklist: Check your HTML
Written on 01 May, 2006 by Webcentral
Categories
Web Design & Content
We use this document for checking our results after any HTML cutting. I hope that it’ll help any new and experienced developers.
Structure and Visualisation
- Do not use <font> element.
- Move arrangement attributes (align, valign, width, height) to CSS.
- Do not use tables except showing table data. Using tables for visual formatting is acceptable in complex situations only. Max table nesting can not be great than 3.
- Move attribute “background” to CSS.
- Design of input fields and buttons must be written as class in CSS.
- Style table must be written as external file and linked using <link>
- All images related to design (not content) move to block with style {background: transparent url(“gif”) no-repeat;}
HTML code
- If table cell contains only image with width and height, then don’t use these attributes for cell.
- Use minimum cols and rows for tables.
- All <image> elements must have “width” and “height” attributes.
- All <image> elements, which are not links, don’t have “border” attribute.
- All attributes values must be placed in double quotes.
- All tags and attributes names must be in low case.
CSS code
- Unique elements must have “id” attribute, which is used for style. Repeated elements must use classes.
- Determine Links style through styles of (td {}, td a {}, td a:hover {}). a:hover must redefine only changed attributes.
- Determine background color for <body>
- Split declarations to groups (fonts, tables, text blocks, divs)
- Determine geometrical dimensions in percents or pixels.
- All colour values must be as short as possible and in high case (#FFF instead of #ffffff).
- All tags and attribute names must be in low case.
- All margins and indents must be defined for all browsers.
- All classes and identifiers must be named logically with one naming convention.
Structure
- Use title, description and keywords in header.
- All elements with closing tags must have it (ideally, use XHTML 1.0 Transitional/Strict).
- Use alt attribute for <image>. If images don’t have semantic meaning, alt must be empty.
- Use comments before main blocks.
- Use standard tags for creating text structure (<h1>-<h4>, <p>, <ul>, <ol>, <li> and so one).
- Vertical and horizontal menus must be defined using <li>.
- Don’t use <b>; and <i>. Use <strong> and <em>.
- Blocks must be placed in document in the descending order of importance. Blocks location can be defined using CSS.
You can discuss and improve this document at http://www.htmlchecklist.com/
About the Author
Vadim Nareyko, CEO of CalidStyle