In the last issue of the Tech Times, I mentioned I was hard at work with the team here on a new front page design for sitepoint.com. While most of our time has been split between tweaking the CSS styles and crafting the PHP code that will generate the page, any major redesign brings with it the opportunity to improve the HTML code at the heart of your site.

Of course, any newly-written HTML code these days should validate. But there’s more to good HTML code than validation. Validation is the bare minimum you should be doing to assure the quality of your code.

This issue, I’d like to take a look at four simple things you can do to make sure your HTML has that nice, new markup smell…