The new version of XHTML being developed alongside HTML 5 is XHTML 5. Since Internet Explorer 5 is the last browser to not understand XHTML and it doesn’t understand HTML 5 either, XHTML 5 will be the first version of XHTML to become usable at the same time as the equivalent HTML version does. This [...]

I often see requests for help from people claiming that their alt tag doesn’t work in Firefox. This statement of course makes no sense whatsoever and just shows that the person has made two mistakes. Firstly they have confused their terminology as it is an attribute and not a tag and secondly they have misunderstood [...]

This book provides a brief introduction to some of the new HTML tags and CSS that are expected to become part of the standard in 2014 through 2016 as well as a brief look at what might be coming after that. It also provides a reminder of some JavaScript commands originally introduced in 2000 and [...]

Italics is not only used for emphasis. Where content is supposed to be in italics for emphasis it is appropriate to use the <em> tag but where it has some other reason for being in italic that is inappropriate and the <i> tag is the correct one to use. When to use the <i> Tag

There are several reasons for labelling your form fields. Not everyone will be able to tell what text labels what field just from the appearance of the page and so using the label tag to connect them is essential even where it appears to make no difference to how the field works. Why Label Form [...]

The HTML standards provide two different ways to attach labels to form fields. In my view one of the ways is not semantic and means that you can’t define dynamic labels where your visitor can label the field themselves. It also limits where the label can be relative to the field it is labelling.The less [...]

Asking for a password to be entered twice when it is first being set makes sense when the actual text is hidden and you need to request the second copy to check for typos. Now there are arguments for and against just having an ordinary text field for a password which would negate the need [...]

There’s lots of talk lately about HTML 5 but most web sites are still using HTML 3.2. What chance does HTML 5 have when most sites have yet to finish transitioning to HTML 3? Also HTML 5 is still a draft and contains lots of unnecessary new tags so perhaps waiting for the unnecessary tags [...]

Even when people first started using HTML tables to do their page layout, they realised that they were misusing the table tag and were creating a lot of work for themselves in maintaining their pages. The only reason they did it was that no other mechanism for placing content side by side worked in browsers [...]

Internet Explorer as is only to be expected does not handle fieldset tags correctly when applying a background. This isn’t all that surprising given all the other things that the really antiquated versions of IE (7 and earlier) do incorrectly when you compare those browsers with modern alternatives. In this case what is happening is [...]

One possible cause for problems if you use relative addresses to link your pages on your web site together is “relative to what?” Depending on where you have the reference and how you define it you may or may not get what you expect. Figuring out how to get your relative links working correctly is [...]

For web designers, the attitude of the site owner makes a big difference to how easy or hard the job of designing their site will be. Are they going to insist that their site look exactly how they want it to (even though it will be completely unusable) or are they going to rely on [...]