Easy XHTML is a simple form that builds a standard XHTML template with all the meta tag lines that you always need to have in any html file, (but for some reason always tend to forget about). I’m sure not very many WordPress users have a great need for such a thing, but every now and then you run into a situation where you just need to code a single page outside of your blog, and that’s when it comes in handy.

Easy XHTML builds either strict or transitional templates and I put in the four indexing options just for completeness. Although the form is not very fancy, because it will generate all tags regardless of whether you inputted any data or not, it is still faster than trying to write a template by hand or should I say memory.

Overview

The first two options, are pretty simple. The title is what the browser window displays, and the domain url is used to generate the code needed for a favicon.

For the stylesheet, either put in the full url or if the stylesheet is at the root of your directory, then just type in the stylesheet name.

Author and Copyright are pretty self explanatory, just type in what you want for these meta tags.

Description and Keywords are important meta tags if you want to be displayed well on Google and Yahoo. You usually want to have the same words in both the keywords and description. The description should be short and to the point, 25 to 30 words (or about 160 to 180 characters). For the keywords, you can separate phrases or words with commas. Keywords should be limited to 15 to 20 words.

There are four indexing options, just choose the one you want, with the most obvious choice being to index all.

Lastly are the doc types for the template. Transitional is the most popular.

Notes
I have double-checked the output of the form for errors and it does validate. You should note that the template created is for English language and specifies the more common ISO-8859-1 encoding.

If you find this useful, let me know. You can find Easy XHTML under the Tools section on the sidebar.