Although the standards are not yet fully supported by all browsers in all circumstances, creating standards-compatible pages is the best way to ensure good rendering. As always, learning to use new technologies will take some time and will give you some incompatibility headaches. Nonetheless the results will be well worth the investment.

Links

W3C specifications:

• XHTML 1.0
• CSS 1
• CSS 2
• DOM

Doctypes:

• Mozilla
• Explorer 6 on Windows
• Opera
• Explorer 5 on Mac (summary)

Validation:

• W3C (X)HTML (or the beta version with better error messages)
• W3C CSS

Compatibility tables:

• XHTML tags
• Attributes
• DoctypesRendering mMode
• W3C DOM

Mailing lists:

• From evolt.org, thelist, for general web development questions.
• XHTML-L, for XHTML questions.
• css-discuss, for CSS questions.
• WDF DOM, for JavaScript W3C DOM questions.

Accessibility:

• Bobby. Use with care, though.
• Accessify

Useful:

• A useful list of Tools for web developers, from the University of Minnesota at Duluth.