Luke Wroblewski has a series of good articles that explains the importance of consistant form design in web applications. The articles can be found at:

• Web Application Form Layout – Part I
• Web Application Form Layout – Part II

Is ALT a tag or an attribute? Is   a character entity or character reference? It appears that many web authors don’t use the proper nomenclature for many of the tools in our HTML toolbox. Lachlan Hunt explains HTML Tags in his most recent blog post.

Ian Hickson has a paper titled – Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful – that outlines why authors intending their work for public consumption should stick to HTML 4.01.

The W3C has recently released a document titled – XHTML Frequently Answered Questions. The FAQ answers questions like:

• Why is XHTML needed? Isn’t HTML good enough?
• What are the advantages of using XHTML rather than HTML?
• and, Why is it allowed to send XHTML 1.0 documents as text/html?

The W3C maintains a list of all the valid DTDs you can use in your documents. A good page to bookmark then visit when in doubt!

Ben Hammersley has created a slick service that will present XHTML Validator Results in RSS :. This is a nice script to alert you when your page validation breaks.

Kupu is a ‘document-centric’ open source client-side editor for Mozilla, Netscape and Internet Explorer. The editor allows you to add WYSIWYG XHTML editing to any of your web applications or content management systems.

What is most impressive about Kupu, is that it uses CSS in favor of HTML for layout and presentation.

Andy Clark has written a great article/tutorial that discusses how to create Stylish and accessible forms.

His article reminds us to :

• Always use the label tag and associate it with form elements.
• Group related elements using the fieldset tag.
• Provide a title or legend for each field set using the legend tag.
• Group radio buttons in a fieldset tag, and provide a label for each checkbox.
• Always provide a button to submit forms. Don’t use JavaScript to automatically submit them.
• Provide a logical form layout.

The W3C Markup Validation Service has recently been improved to include new documentation and navigation. The popular validation service now also offers helpful explanations and recovery mechanisms instead of fatal errors.

These changes should be welcomed by most web developers – including my students who ALWAYS validate!

[link via Web Standards Project]

The <title> element is one of the most important elements in your HTML Documents. It identifies not only your page, but the content contained within your page and is one of the most important contributors to a positive user experience for a Website’s visitors. Why then is is so poorly used?

The Importance of the Hypertext Document Title is another great article at sitepoint.com that discusses why it is important to create useful page titles and offers up some great tips on creating them.