XHTML: Difference between revisions
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* | * [http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/bestwebdev.html Web Page Development: Best Practices] by the Safari development team at Apple. | ||
Revision as of 13:18, 11 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>,
- see Semantic HTML for further details
Styling
How the HTML is laid out should be controlled by CSS in whichever theme is currently selected.
- Ensure that the HTML contains enough id="..." and class="..." attributes so that theme designers can easily control how
- Never embed inline styles in the HTML (that is, do not use the style="..." attribute).
- As you change core Moodle code, you must update the standard theme so that Moodle looks OK out of the box.
- If you need to make basic style definitions for a module (or some other sorts of plugin), 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
See also:
- Web Page Development: Best Practices by the Safari development team at Apple.
