Rad Geek People's Daily

official state media for a secessionist republic of one

Web standards.

Rad Geek People’s Daily is designed to comply with open web standards. The content is marked up with XHTML 1.1, and formatted for presentation with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS 3). Compliance with the standards is validated using the W3C‘s automatic XHTML validator and CSS validator.

Besides formal compliance with the specifications, all of these pages are also marked up using structured semantic markup. They have been designed from the ground-up to use the full richness of XHTML tags to reflect the logical structure of the document, and to separate the layout information into Cascading Style Sheets.

Separating structure from presentation isn’t just an ideological point; it has very real benefits. In particular, it allows me to easily implement many different ways of presenting the same content. You won’t, for example, notice any links to Printer Friendly versions of the documents on these pages. Instead, all the adjustments needed for a printer-friendly page are handled automatically just by defining a second stylesheet for the same data. There’s also a somewhat more significant pay-off for making multiple presentation easy: properly structured, standards-compliant XHTML makes webpages more accessible for disabled or non-conventional Internet users. If it’s easy to adapt a web page to multiple presentation formats, then it’s easy to adapt it to screen readers, text-only browsers, mobile devices, and many other special-needs applications. Proper semantic design using web standards is just the right thing to do.

Anticopyright. This was written 2004–2007 by Rad Geek. Feel free to reprint if you like it. This machine kills intellectual monopolists.