Interview questions for web developers

Interview questions

Web standards

  1. What is the W3C and what does it do?
  2. What is HTML validation? Do you ever validate your HTML? Why?
  3. What is the current W3C recommendation for hypertext markup?
  4. What are web standards?

Accessibility

  1. What is the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative and what does it do?
  2. What are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines produced by the W3C?
  3. What is meant by A, AA, and AAA accessibility conformance?
  4. List 3 ways that content can be made more accessible to visually impaired users

Design approaches

  1. How would you decide which browsers your company's web design should support?
  2. Faced with the choice between a fixed-width and fluid layout for a new website design, which would you choose? Why?
  3. What is user-centred design?
  4. At what stage/s of the development lifecycle should end users be involved?

Maintaining knowledge

  1. How do you keep your web design/development knowledge up to date?
  2. Do you read any web development related blogs? Which ones? What do you like about these?
  3. Do you participate in any web development related mailing lists? Which ones? What do you like about these?
  4. What web-related conferences have you been to recently?

Exercises

Correct the errors in the following HTML mark up

<html>
  <body>
   <title>Company X</title>
    <h1>Welcome to the Company X home page</h2>
    <table width=100% bgcolor=ffffff border=0>
    <td align=top><center>Latest News & Information</center>
    <p>&nbsp;</p>
    <p>This page provides the latest news
    and information from Company X.</p>
    </table>
  </body>
</html>

Errors included

  1. There is no document type declaration
  2. The title should appear between head elements
  3. The closing heading tag is incorrect. It should be an h1. This would cause the whole document to be formatted at heading level 1.
  4. The table attribute values should be quoted
  5. The table background colour, bgcolor, should be expressed as #ffffff or #fff or better still, presentation should be handled in a stylesheet
  6. The table cell, td, needs to be enclosed by a table row, tr
  7. Top is not a valid attribute for align. It is an attribute of valign, and valign is a deprecated attribute in XHTML.
  8. The center element is deprecated. Use a stylesheet for presentation
  9. There is no closing table cell element, /td
  10. An HTML entity, &amp;, should replace the ampersand in Latest News and Information
  11. The paragraph containing the non-breaking space entity, &nbsp;, should be removed. These are frequently generated by WYSIWYG HTML editors and unnecessarily bloat code
  12. A smart candidate may suggest a more descriptive page title or the use of meta data to increase the chances of the page being usefully indexed by search engines.

Correct the errors in the following stylesheet

body {
    color: #000000
    background-color: #ffffff
    font-face: "Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"
    font-size: "medium"
}
code pre {
    color: #000000
    background-color: #ffffff
    font-face: "monospace"
    font-size: "small"
}
.footer {
    color: #666666
    background-color: #ffffff
    font-face: "Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"
    font-size: "tiny"
}

Errors included

  1. Each property/value pair needs to have a semi-colon separator (not needed for the last pair)
  2. Font-face is not a valid property. Font-family should be used
  3. Property values do not need to be quoted
  4. A comma should be used between the selectors code and pre
  5. Tiny is not a valid value for the font-size property

Related (external) links