faq HTML Resources & FAQs

[Philip]

This thread should help users with frequently asked questions and links to some resources we've found useful.

 

HTML5, should I use it?

In short, YES! HTML5 is great because it keeps the web moving forward with new developments. New attributes & form types are included and are backwards compatible. Other new additions such as new tags (section, article, etc.) are great additions and only require a slight JS & CSS fix to apply to older browsers. A few links that come in handy for HTML5: html5.org, html5.info, and diveintohtml5.info

 

Microdata, what is it?

Microdata is great generating rich content markup. It allows crawlers and screen readers to know more about the information being displayed. An example of this would be the "Person" schema, which allows you to define meta-data about a user. This is great for blogs and profiles, and Google will be able to render and display this information in the search results. You can read more from Google or visit schema.org

 

Should my layout be based on tables or CSS?

This is an old question that surprisingly still pops up today. Tables are for tabular data, not layouts. You should use CSS for presentation & layouts, and HTML for the structure of the data.

 

(X)HTML, what is it?

In short, XML is for structuring data, HTML is for displaying data, thus XHTML allows you to combine both. There are different rules to be applied to XHTML that don't apply to HTML4 documents. You can read a full debate on this on our site, or read more about XHTML on wikipedia.