2.0 Web Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium concerned with maintaining Web standards and guidelines. Websites can look different in different browsers because HTML can be coded in different ways and browsers can read HTML in different ways too. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has attempted to make a common standard of HTML and CSS - no easy task considering that during the short history of the Internet, browsers have come and gone, and some have muddied the waters by adding their own bespoke HTML elements with blatant disregard for standards.

The current standards for HTML are 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 - see HTML History for more details. The current standards for CSS are CSS2.1 and CSS3 - see CSS History for more details. And currently Internet Explorer is the dominant browser.

Soon HTML 5 will the standard to use and can already be implemented if required but browser support varies.

Writing HTML and CSS following the W3C standards should ensure websites render correctly in all browsers, and will avoid adding statements to webpages such as "This site is best viewed in IE7". This tutorial is written in XHTML, which is a stricter and cleaner version of HTML.

• 1.0 Search Engine Optimisation
• 1.1 Internal Ranking Factors
• 1.2 External Ranking Factors
• 1.3 Getting inbound links
• 1.4 Submitting to Search Engines
• 1.5 SEO Bad Practice
• 2.0 Web Standards
• 2.1 DTD
• 2.2 Choosing a DTD
• 2.3 Validating Pages
• 3.0 Web Summary
• 4.0 Other Web Languages
• 4.1 Javascript
• 4.2 XML
• 4.3 ASP
• 4.4 PHP
• 4.5 SQL
• 5.0 Monetizing Websites