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Why Code Your Own XHTML?
XHTML Interview Questions and Answers
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6. Why Code Your Own XHTML?
Programs that produce HTML for you often do so badly, often producing Web pages that do things the long way. When you code your pages by hand you have an intimate understanding of what you're doing, and can make the actual size of the Web page file as small as possible. This decreases download times, so your pages load faster and your users are happier.
When you use a program to generate HTML for you, you don't get the chance to understand how your page is built internally because it's all done for you. This is not a problem as long as everything works… but what if it doesn't? If you find that your Web page doesn't display properly in Internet Explorer 4, and many of your users use that browser, you're going to have to sort it out. This means forgetting about the program and looking at the code yourself. Will you see the problem? If you've been using the program to code the page for you, when problems occur you probably won't have the knowledge you need to fix them.
The Internet is no longer limited to people with computers viewing Websites through one or two different Web browsers. Everything has a Web browser in it these days: mobile phones, televisions, personal digital assistants, cars… even fridges! Blind users "view" Websites using speech synthesis or Braille devices. There is no way you can test each page you produce in all the possible devices on which it may be used.
But there is a way to ensure you have the best chance your site will work in most scenarios: to produce pages using the standards laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the people who work on XHTML and other Internet standards. The W3C provide a validation service to check that your page meets the standards, and if it does, it therefore has the best chance of being used on any device.
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