HTML & CSS Coding Guidelines

Question

We are contracting an external consultant out to generate XHTML (Transitional) and CSS for most of the major pages of a new project we are currently working on.

I've been asked to put together a list of guidelines for them so that we can be sure that a certain level of quality can be expected. As a bit of technical background, we will be incorperating the raw HTML they provide into an ASP.NET web forms application (utilising the usual master pages / external stylesheets / jquery). Javascript should not be a consideration, but formatting and organisation of CSS should be.

I've made a start but quickly realised that this is probably not a unique situation and that a tried and tested list might be out there somewhere that I can at least use as a template! Has anyone got any experience of this?

Answer 1

From a technical standpoint, pages must pass validation is probably the first test I'd have.

I would expect the site to be able to be used by someone with JavaScript disabled, and someone using a screen reader (this is quite a good one as it should also highlight issues with inappropriately used tables and other things such as missing image alt tags, inconsistent use of header tags etc.).

Answer 2

One good test I always make for myself is opening the page and ctrl+scroll. The zooming gives you an immediate idea about how flexible and liquid your design is.

In IE this tends to fail no matter what, but there you could also try to make the font bigger and see what happens (pay attention to buttons stretching vertically for example)