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I'm considering outsourcing a part of our web application development project for freelancers, namely the site building part. What I mean by site building is the process of creating the xhtml/css template files, with dummy content, from a psd file (or any other graphical layout file). The resulting xhtml/css files will be used by our developers as templates for cms based page rendering. The cms in this case is Drupal, but that might not be of much relevance.

I'm looking for a good set of requirements, that

  1. will result in good quality xhtml/css code, complying with today's standards
  2. leaves little to the freelancer developer's imagination in terms of what I need

I'm thinking about requirements like:

  • Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional document type, validated by validator.w3.org
  • Identical rendering in all modern browsers (FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE7-8) and also in IE6
  • All opening and closing block-level elements should be properly commented, referencing the functional part of the user interface they belong to (menu, toolbar, content, etc)
  • No inline CSS definitions

And so on. How would you organize a list like that? What requirements would you add?

Edit: started bounty. I'd like to have a clear set of requirements that will save me some troubles.

András Szepesházi
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3 Answers3

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You have a pretty good start, how about this?

  • Valid XHTML & CSS
  • Must work in IE6-8, FF and Chrome
  • No inline CSS should be referenced as separate file
  • CSS needs to make appropriate use of cascading styles
  • CSS should have styles for ul/ol lists, h1-h4 headers, forms, blockquote, comment, etc.
  • All image paths need to be relative
  • All image files need to be saved for web in the smallest size without pixelating
  • Design needs to be tableless
  • Any javascript files need to be local (not referenced from other sites)
  • Block elements need to be commented
  • Menu structure should have CSS for first, active and last classes
  • Documentation and style guide (classes for like alert boxes, etc)
kel
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You may want to consider Unobtrusive JavaScript. It would probably make any JavaScript debugging you have to do a little less painful since you wouldn't have to dig through the HTML to work with the JavaScript code.

TaylorOtwell
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Identical rendering in all modern browsers (FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE7-8) and also in IE6

I'd rank these into "must have" and "should have". At some point, you don't want to continue paying for handling IE quirks.

Also, I'd provide specific versions. Specific. It makes it much, much easier to resolve questions and mysteries if you provide them with a concrete list of releases that you'll use to see if they've actually done the work.

All opening and closing block-level elements should be properly commented, referencing the functional part of the user interface they belong to (menu, toolbar, content, etc)

This is what "class" and "ID" are for. I'm not sure comments help much with this. However, if you really like the comments, it's fine to ask for it.

Additionally.

You should define the class names you want as a minimal set and what ID's you require on each page.

You might want to consider having some kind of test suite. It's not easy to test browsers and rendering with an automated test toolkit. You will probably have to fall back to manually clicking through something to look at the various kinds of page templates you're having built to see if "lorem ipsum" looks correct on each one.

S.Lott
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