Having been on DW Beginner and Intermediate last week, I was able to tidy up some very messy code that was on my website, it was a wonder the site was still working! - thank you so much. I created the website in Dreamweaver MX 2004 in HTML, without making the pages XHTML compliant. I now have Dreamweaver 8 available to me and I am wondering what settings I must use so that the software will be able to update the website without causing any conflicts between HTML and XHTML.

Eventually we want to move on to making pages with PHP, and I have bought teh book 'DW MX Dynamic Applications, Training from the Source', which tells me how to make pages XHTML compliant. Would you recommend that I do that before going on to PHP, or is it strictly necessary? The book advises repalcing <br> with <br />, changing <b> to <strong> and a rather clever way of the closing bracket of teh <img> tag, which should be />.

Can you advise please? Thanks - Sara Sims

Hi Sara,

Glad to hear you're improving your pages.

In Dreamweaver 8, you can open any file and go to File -> Convert -> and then choosing the compliance you wish to convert your file to. This should convert <img> to <img /> etc. How 'strict' you want to be is up to you. If you choose Strict instead of Transitional, you won't have as leeway with coding standards, but if you're using Dreamweaver to make all your pages, this won't make a bit of difference.

To find out more about compliance visit http://www.w3.org
Or to validate your pages, visit http://validator.w3.org
The validator checks your pages and gives you instructions on what to do to get your page perfectly valid.

PHP will output the (X)HTML, so yes, it makes sense to learn the standards of (X)HTML first.

I hope this answers your questions. Good luck creating your dynamic web content.

Regards, Rich