The other week I posted a CSS Baseline. So I’ve decided to create its counterpart: a Markup Baseline. I put some thought into if I should create a markup baseline in the first place. I can’t find any other attempts to create something like this. I believe this is due to the issues I ran into when creating this baseline.

Issues

Purpose

Well formed markup (semantic markup that is) is based on the content. Content is usually based on the purpose of a site. So how would you make a baseline all different kinds of content? You might just end up with a baseline for every different type of website out there. There would be millions of baselines then. And that wouldn’t be very productive.

doctype

Different types of sites may require different doctypes. I thought about making some php functions that would switch the doctype based upon your preference. That seemed a bit more like a framework and out of the scope of this project.

The Baseline

I’ve noticed over the years that I have been creating websites in similar fashion. Websites I’ve created lately have followed a set of ideas that I’ve concocted. The basics of theses ideas start with the structure of the web page. You can usually distill web page structure down to 4 major areas: the header, navigation, the main content area and the footer. Now this doesn’t work in all cases but it should work for most. Again this is an issue with the purpose of the site or page. However most sites will have these 4 elements. In the end I settled on the basic structure of 4 major elements and the XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype.

Markup Baseline

When Eric Meyer first came out with his reset style sheet I jumped on it and put it in all the sites I was creating then. It caused some problems, it fixed others and it added about 800 bytes to the CSS. I was using it as a “silver bullet” to fix my layout problems. And I was wrong. I mis-read Eric’s post many times. What he was saying was that his reset CSS was a starting point for us to make our own or to customize his.

It makes me wonder: If I got that wrong, how many others did too? A colleague and friend of mine, Jon Zuck said that he didn’t like Eric’s method because it was like taking a shotgun to the styles. I’ve also had other conversations with people ranging to loving what Eric has done and to hating it.

After much thought I’ve created my own starting point. It covers most of the common elements I use in nearly every site I build. It is what I use as a base for a new site I create, though I end up changing it more often then not. I’ve uploaded a CSS and a XHTML file as examples of what I’ve done.