HTML Web Standards Interview Question

What is a DTD? What DTD do you generally use? Why? Pros and cons.

A DTD is a Document Type Definition, also know as DOCTYPE. In a document served as text/html, the DOCTYPE informs the browswer how to interpret the content of the page. If the the doctype is not declared, the browser assumes you don’t know how to code, and goes into “quirks mode”. If you know what you are doing and include a correct XHTML DOCTYPE, your page will be rendered in “standards mode”.

Accessibility Interview Question

Importance in selecting font size for a web page?

Font sizes should be declared using relative measurement values, such as ems, via a style sheet, without the use of the term !important. There are issues with browser font size enlarging which can be rectified via CSS.

CSS Interview Question

a) What are the possible values for the display attribute that are supported by all browsers?

b) What is the default value for the display attribute for the image element? (what is the difference between inline and block level elements)
c)What does display: run-in do?
d) Difference between “visibility:hidden” and “display:none”? What are the pros and cons of using display:none?

Answer

main values: none, block, inline, list-item, run-in
all values: inline | block | list-item | run-in | compact | marker | table | inline-table | table-row-group | table-header-group | table-footer-group | table-row | table-column-group | table-column | table-cell | table-caption | none | inherit
default value: inline, block or list-item, depending on the element. The <img> is an inline element.
Run-in should make the run-in element be the first line of the next sibling block level element, if it is before a block level element that is not floated or absolutely positioned. If the next sibling is positioned or floated, then the run-in element will be a block level element instead of appearing in-line.
PPK’s Quirksmode explains it well. The w3schools lists table display values.
When visibility is set to hidden, the element being hidden still occupies its same place in the layout of the page. If the display is set to none, the element does not occupy any space on the page — as if it didn’t exist..

CSS Interview Question

Question

a) What are the five possible values for “position”?
b) What is the default/initial value for “position”?
c) How does the browser determine where to place positioned elements
d) What are the pros and cons of using absolute positioning?
e) if they are really advanced, ask about IE z-index issues with positioned elements.

Answer

a) Values for position: static, relative, absolute, fixed, inherit
b) Static
c) They are placed relative to the next parent element that has absolute or relative value declared
d) Absolutely positioned elements are removed from the document flow. The positioned element does not flow around the content of other elements, nor does their content flow around the positioned element. An absolutely positioned element may overlap other elements, or be overlapped by them.
e) IE treats a position like a z-index reset, so you have to declare position of static on the parent element containing the z-indexed elements to have them responsd to z-index correctly.

CSS Interview Question

Question:

Write a snippet of CSS that will display a paragraph in blue in older browsers, red in newer browsers, green in IE6 and black in IE7

Possible Answer:

#content p{color:blue}
html>body #content p {color:red}
* html #content p{color:green}
html>body #content p {*color:black;}

Basic Javascript Interview Question

Question:

What is the correct way to include JavaScript into your HTML?

Answer:

correct explanation using inline event handlers or inline code

Basic Javascript Array / XHTML Form Interview Question

Question

Are the following all equal, and, if so, what would your code look like to make the following all equal the same thing:

  alert(document.forms["myform"].elements["field"].value);
  alert(document.forms[1].elements[1].value);
  alert(document.myform.field.value);

answer:

<form name="myform" method="post" action="something">
<input name="anything" value="anything" type="something" />
<input name="field" value="something" type="something" />
</form>

Answer includes knowing that the form is the second form on the page, and that the field input element is the second element within that form.

JavaScript Interview Question

Question:

How do you dynamically add a paragraph with stylized content to a page?

Possible Answer:

newParagraph = document.createElement('p');
newParagraph.setAttribute('class', 'myClass');
newText = document.createTextNode('this is a new paragraph');
newParagraph.appendChild(newText);
myLocation = document.getElementById('parent_of_new_paragraph);
myLocation.appendChild(newParagraph);