Today’s discussion will be on web coding standards, which tend to generate almost as many religious battles as operating system choices.

We’ll cover the HTML standards development process, existing HTML and XHTML standards, problems with existing standards, and browser support for standards. We’ll also discuss the issues surrounding separation of presentation and content, and the importance of CSS in standards-based web development.

Closely related to the topic of standards and appropriate coding is the topic of web site accessibility. We’ll talk about different kinds of accessibility, the reasons for building accessible web sites, and some techniques for making sure sites are accessible to all users.