Plain Old Semantic HTML

photo credit: wetwebwork
Do you remember when you first checked out the source code for a web site in the 1990’s? My experience was with the Netscape browser, and the Netscape proprietary blink tag. Let me tell you that from that time on, I would print out the HTML markup and study it. Even then, I wanted more…and that’s when I found that MicroSoft had their own markup tag called “marquee“. Man, I became the 90’s geek that everyone wanted him to make their web sites blink and scroll!

It’s a good thing that my coding abilities have improved since then. Web design in general has come along way since then too, and specifically in the realms of semantic XHTML and standards-based markup. From a tag-soup junkie to a member of the Standards-based community, I have been evangelizing web standards in our internet world that is still to this day blasted with HTML code splashed with tables for layouts. I have seen the font tag used still today, and I’ve even come across that old friend (read: fiend) blink tag used on web sites that I have been to this month as I surf the Net.

Welcome to 2008 - where I’d like to present this topic as a discussion for us to comment on, as it relates to a hot topic - designing a blog. We have to consider that our blogs should be eye-candy dressed and semantically correct, (X)HTML valid. That’s one of the great things I love about the WordPress CMS platform. It has readily available themes from standards-thinking coders. I myself use many of the theme templates that I find from web sites that host them. Of course, I only use the ones that use validate, semantically correct (X)HTML. And of course, I only download from authoritative WordPress them sites.

You will find that the masses of themes you can get (from the free to the premium ones) are using (X)HTML markup that does validate with the online W3C checkers. I have found that I must manually edit most of the plugins I use because they are not valid markup, but actually, I can live with most of those as is.

So join this discussion if you are a member of the web design community, or are simply interested in blog and design creation. Please - let us here what your brain has to say by commenting!

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