Science & Engineering Node Services - School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University at Buffalo
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Construction
SENS Guidelines
- It is recommended that SEAS web sites be written using valid HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 and CSS1 (specific requirements may change over time but should reflect current recommendations from the W3C).*
- Dynamic languages (JavaScript, PHP, Perl, etc.) may be used as long as the final code generated to the user's browser validates to the standard set above.
Questions you might have
What's HTML?
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is the most commonly used language on the web. It's sort of like an interpreter between the pages that you write and the browsers of the people who read your pages: it takes your text, which is tagged, and tells the browser how to display it. That sounds a lot like CSS, but while CSS is used strictly for formatting and positioning elements, HTML is used to determine what text means, in the context of your document. For example, look at the heading you just read, What's HTML?. It probably looks like boldface type, which it is--but the reason that it displays as boldface type is that its element, h3 (heading 3), is set to display that way.
This may seem like silly semantics, which is half right: at its heart, HTML is a semantic language. It is intended to lay out documents according to the logic of their content, not according to design principles. That's what CSS is for.
Although XHTML is the current standard, you still need to pay attention to HTML: it is the basis of XHTML, and is much more detailed and descriptive. HTML 4.01 is the basis of XHTML.
What's XHTML?
XHTML, eXtensible HyperText Markup Language, is kind of a bridge between HTML, which you might be familiar with, and XML, which you might not be. HTML provides basic markup to describe the elements of a document. XHTML does the same thing, but without the browser-specific tags that had begun to run rampant in HTML about the time XHTML became the standard.
While there is no "official" version of HTML, the closest thing to it is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s recommendations. Their current recommendation, which has been in place since 1998, is XHTML. In addition, New York State Mandatory Technology Standard S04-001, Accessibility of State Agency Web-Based Intranet and Internet Information and Applications mandates the use of "the most current web document specifications." That's XHTML.
What's CSS?
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, determine what your pages will look like. If you've ever used styles in Microsoft Word, or templates in PowerPoint, you've got an idea of what style sheets are all about. In PowerPoint, for example, you set the styles in the Master slide. No matter what you type on the rest of the slides, the words will have the same style--the font face, and type, and color--from slide to slide. CSS gives you the same power: once you set a style, you don't have to bother formatting individual words or paragraphs; you just need to make sure to indicate what style you want them to use.
CSS can be a lot of fun, and give you a lot of flexibility; just take a look at CSS Zen Garden if you want to see some of the many things that CSS can do. But the main reason for doing it is to format your documents without using deprecated tags, especially the <font> tag. The <font> tag is deprecated: it is not permitted in the most current HTML recommendation. According to New York State, "the use of deprecated elements or attributes is not allowed.". If you're still using the <font> tag to format text, you need to stop now.
Why should I have to learn all this stuff? Won't FrontPage (or Dreamweaver) do it for me?
Well, yes and no. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web development tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage are handy and sometimes indispensable for creating web pages quickly and easily. Unfortunately, versions of FrontPage prior to FrontPage 2003 had a tendency to use HTML that only worked in Internet Explorer. As a result, sites written in FrontPage did not work well in other browsers.
You might be tempted to assume that nobody uses anything but Internet Explorer anyway. However, that's simply not true, especially with some of the great features of newer browsers like Mozilla Firefox, which offers ad blocking and tabbed browsing. With the wide variety of browsers and operating systems available, especially in a university environment like UB, your visitors are likely to use just about anything to visit your site. If you develop for only one browser, you could be turning people away.
That said, FrontPage 2003 is better able than previous versions to write valid HTML and XHTML, and Dreamweaver has always been pretty good at it. The reason you still need to know at least the basics of HTML and XHTML is that you need to be able to fix the stuff that your WYSIWYG doesn't know how to. It's just software; it can only do what you tell it to. If you tell it to put a box in the upper left-hand corner, it will, but if you look at the box in your browser and it's not displaying in the upper left-hand corner, you need to be able to go in and fix it.
Where can I learn about HTML, XHTML, and CSS?
There are many good resources for learning XHTML and CSS on our Resources and Links page.
You should really be telling everyone not to use tables for layout. Why aren't you?
The practice of using HTML tables for layout is common. Technically, in HTML tables are intended for tabular data, such as the results of an experiment. However, most WYSIWYG editing tools are still using tables for layout, and even if our users aren't using WYSIWYG tools, in many cases it won't be practical for them to have to learn enough CSS to redesign existing pages. So while it's a good idea to stick to tables for tabular data and use CSS for layout, we're not going to tell you not to use tables.
