XHTML: Difference between revisions
| Line 20: | Line 20: | ||
* tables should not be used for page layout, just to display tabular information, | * tables should not be used for page layout, just to display tabular information, | ||
* if something is a heading, it should be marked up using <h''n''> tags, for an appropriate ''n'', | * if something is a heading, it should be marked up using <h''n''> tags, for an appropriate ''n'', | ||
* if something is a list, it should marked up using <ol>, <ul> or <dl>, | * <nowiki>if something is a list, it should marked up using <ol>, <ul> or <dl>,</nowiki> | ||
* and so on. | * and so on. | ||
Revision as of 06:15, 9 June 2009
XHTML Strict 1.0
Moodle output must be compliant with XHTML Strict 1.0. This means it must be:
Well-formed XML
In a well-formed XML document, every opening tag has a matching close tag; tags are properly nested attributes are properly quoted, and the file contains no syntax errors. See the XML specification for a formal definition.
While developing, you should have the option Administration ► Server ► Debugging ► XML strict headers turned on. With this option on, your web browser will refuse to display any page that is not well-formed. This makes such problems easy to find and fix.
Valid XHTML Strict
This means that the XML of your page follows the particular rules from the XHTML-1.0-Strict DTD. For example, the first tag in the file must be <html>, a <form> tag must have an action="" attribute, an <li> can only appear inside an <ol> or <ul>, you cannot use <frame> tags, and so on. and so on.
You can check whether the HTML you output is valid by using a HTML validator, for example the Html Validator add-on for Firefox.
Semantic markup
That is, HTML tags should be used only to mark up the appropriate types of content. For example:
- tables should not be used for page layout, just to display tabular information,
- if something is a heading, it should be marked up using <hn> tags, for an appropriate n,
- if something is a list, it should marked up using <ol>, <ul> or <dl>,
- and so on.
Styling
- Make sure you provide enough CSS ids and classes to enable a designer to modify everything with CSS.
- Never use inline styles
- If you need to make basic style definitions for a module, put them in a file called styles.php in that module. This will be included into every theme.
Moodle API
- Use the functions in lib/weblib to do as much as possible (print_header(), print_box() etc)
- This API will change a lot in Moodle 2.0. See: Navigation_2.0
