Web standards checklist The term web standards can mean
different things to different people. For some, it is 'table-
free sites', for others it is 'using valid code'. However, web
standards are much broader than that. A site built to web
standards should adhere to standards (HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS,
XSLT, DOM etc) and pursue best practices (valid code, accessible
code, semantically correct code, user-friendly URLs etc). In
other words, a site built to web standards should ideally be
lean, clean, CSS-based, accessible, usable and search engine
friendly. • Quality of code 1. Does the site use a correct
Doctype? A doctype (short for 'document type declaration')
informs the validator which version of (X)HTML you're using, and
must appear at the very top of every web page. Doctypes are a
key component of compliant web pages: your markup and CSS won't
validate without them 2. Does the site use a Character set? If a
user agent (eg. a browser) is unable to detect the character
encoding used in a Web document, the user