Web Standards

While the rest of this site is tweaked slightly to work correctly in Microsoft’s very broken Internet Explorer browser much of the content linked from this page is designed as the ultimate test for standards compliance. Most of the pages here will work in IE, but those used to test features that are closer to the cutting-edge are served up using the XHTML MIME type, which IE can not display (it instead tries to download the file).

Pete’s Web Browser Test Pages
There are other sites out there that offer very good test suites, but very few of them test the extreme cases of following the latest HTML and XHTML standards to the letter, and fewer still set out to test some of the important but seldom-implemented features introduced in HTML 4.0 and CSS-2, such as fixed/repeating table headers (and footers) and fixed positioning. This test suite sets out to do that—and more.
HTML Entity Test Tables
Very few Web authors correctly and completely understand how to properly reference characters other than letters and numbers. The differing standards between Windows, Macintosh, and Unix systems causes many of the problems, and very few understand that none of these character sets are allowed in HTML documents.
Electronic Publishing Expert Set
The quality and readability of electronic documents has suffered greatly because too many of the long-established rules and practices for producing good-looking paper documents have almost completely been ignored.
HTML 4.01 Presentation/Typesetting Test
This page demonstrates the visual diferences between common Web practices and text that has traditional typesetting features applied.

Sites for learning about Web standards

The World Wide Web Consortium
The Web Standards Project
A List Apart
Dan’s Web Tips
Jukka “Yucca” Korpela’s site
The Unicode Consortium
Forms of Unicode
Alan Flavell’s Web postings
Agitprop
CSS Pointers Index

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