HTML Tidbits

Just out of curiosity, I reviewed some of the HTML training on Lynda.com. I believed I had decent HTML chops and wanted to see how they approached learning HTML, from a beginner’s standpoint. I noticed they used “not recommended practices” in the beginning videos (no doctype declaration, font tag soup, etc.), but if you watch all the videos, they slowly add more “best practices” into the mix. And, I picked up a few tidbits I didn’t know.

Did you know…?

• The HTML 4.01 Transitional docType doesn’t require the ending <p> tag.
• The strict docTypes (especially XHTML 1) will often ignore your CSS directives.
• UTF-8 charset is the “ideal” definition according to the W3C, but ISO 8859-1 is the best in practice.

The second one I have experienced for myself. I’m not an advanced-level CSS coder yet, and XHTML (strict) practically requires it. I kept getting balked with my layout work, so I switched back to HTML 4.01 Transitional. Until I can do advanced CSS techniques, XHTML (with the strict docType) is not going to work for me.