Building a Simple Accessible Webpage in XHTML
Introduction
Establishing your own place on the WWW (World Wide Web) has become more
of a necessity than a desire. Whether business or personal, the Internet and its standards are
evolving; more and more browsers are being improved in line with web standards,
leaving older 'deprecated' software behind.
However, some users still have access to deprecated browsers, or devices
specifically intended to aid those users with disabilities, and thus, may
see/access sites as they weren't originally intended. It is therefore important
to write valid clean code so that these users can at least access the content
of your website, which is ultimately more important than its visual identity.
Tip: The important thing is to reach the majority and convey the intended
information.
Not only are there many different browsers (most free to download), there
are different versions of each browser as they continue to evolve. There
are also different platforms, e.g. PC, Mac, Unix, etc. which will render
each version of each browser differently too.
Brief History of HTML
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) has been used to link text pages since
about 1989 in a very basic way. The language has evolved through versions
1-4 in order to introduce new features.
With the introduction of mobile devices, HTML has had to move on dramatically
and hopes eventually to evolve into a language called XML (Extensible Markup Language). Instead of calling
the newest version HTML 5, it was decided to integrate HTML with XML and
XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) was born.
Text Editor
Which ever editor you choose to work with, it is important to be able
to pick at the code in its raw sense as opposed to via a WYSIWYG (What
You See Is What You Get) editor such as DreamWeaver, GoLive or FrontPage,
which are prone to 'bloat' the code with unneccesary and often deprecated
tags.
For this tutorial, we recommend you use a simple text editor, such as
Notepad, so you can see exactly what you are doing, and the hand coding
will put you in good stead for building future-proof, accessible websites.
This tutorial is aimed at those with limited to no prior experience in writing code and publishing to the Web. The links suppplied in the Resources section will help explain how to use the associated programs you can download free.
