Compliant Blog Theme Requirements

It’s understandable not everyone knows the technical jargon XHTML. You may have heard of HTML, or maybe not. Sorry to say, this blog entry isn’t for the non-tech-savvy blog reader because I’m going to discuss about XHTML/CSS and its requirements for a blog theme.

As you know, there are now more and more emerging blog designers. Some who are Malaysia web designers making their way into blog design as well. It may be harsh to state this but I personally feel some blog designers or blog design companies are not meeting the requirements of a blog theme.

If you’re a Malaysia web designer or blog designer, you’d obviously be going “what blog theme requirements are there?” Well, you’ll need to first answer if you know about web standards. Then you’ll need to ask yourself, if you’ve heard about the W3C.

If you haven’t heard of the above then it explains why you’ve never heard of requirements for designing or creating a blog theme of your own. And to make matters worst, you may be hiring a Malaysia blog designer or web designer who doesn’t know about this either.

One of the things about web standards it’s to help in usability and accessibility. You’ve read in the newspaper how a Malaysia company is helping visually impaired residents utilize the Internet. That is one of the benefits of accessibility and is achievable with the use of XHTML and CSS.

That said, blogs are a media even the blind can read. I’m not saying the blind can’t read it but they will face difficulty in reading if it wasn’t developed with the proper requirements. Today, I came across a local blogger whom I think paid for her blog theme.

Because it looked good I would normally want to see who was the designer or developer. Later did I find out her blog didn’t meet the necessary XHTML/CSS requirements. With the Web Developer Firefox plugin, I can switch a CSS on and off.

When I turned off her CSS, the layout didn’t rearrange as it would on a XHTML/CSS compliant blog or website. It maintained its grid with its content inside. This made me even more curious to why was this happening. Inspection of the source code led me to the cause of all this; HTML Tables!

In web standards, this is one of the taboos because a layout held in tables wouldn’t allow your grid to ‘break’ and is more difficult to read by the visually impaired. Healthy web standards practice of HTML tables is to hold statistical data. Boring – yes. But it presents this data more efficiently to everyone…and anyone.

Therefore, the first requirement in developing your own blog theme is to make sure it’s developed in proper XHTML/CSS.

Question of the day:
Does your company website practice web standards?

[tags]blog theme design, Malaysia web design, blog design, W3C, web standards[/tags]

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