If one of the big tech companies says you're wrong, you might shrug it off. But when four of them — Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla — call you out, that's when you're in real trouble. This is the situation the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) found itself in after pulling some shenanigans with the next version of the Document Object Model (DOM).

Look, I'll be honest. At this point, trying to predict a launch date for Amazon is going to require some divination. There's been no word from the '800-pound gorilla' and no comment on the speculation. All that potential bargain hunters can do is keep refreshing that home page.

But over the weekend Amazon Australia's HTML changed, giving some indication of its first round of product offerings and providing a glimmer of hope that that launch is fast approaching.

Updates to plain HTML aren't as exciting as say, your scripting / server-side language of choice, but seeing as it's the backbone of the front-facing web, it's a good idea to check-up on old faithful every so often. If you've decided to choose today to pop in -- great timing! HTML 5.1 recently became World Wide Web Consortium's "gold standard".

If you cut your chops on the web during the era of hand-coded HTML websites, then you definitely know that the most important part of a good site are the GIFs. How else would you notify your readers that your site is still "under construction"? GifCities helps you find those GIFs from the old World Wide Web.

If you come across a symbol you've never seen before, or you want to look up the unicode for a certain symbol, it may be a small challenge to search for it if you're not entirely sure of its name. Mausr lets you draw the symbol instead, then identifies it based on your drawing.

Whether you're learning HTML or you're a practiced hand and need a refresher, this HTML cheat sheet gives you a quick reference for commonly used tags, what they do, how to use them, and examples of how they work.

We've all heard stories of people who look at a website mockup and say something like "It needs more pop!" or "Make it sleeker" without being specific about what they're looking for. It can be a pain, but this tongue-firmly-in-cheek graphic translates those phrases to language you can actually use.

Windows/Mac/Linux: Adobe just launched Brackets 1.0, a text editor for web developers. It's free and has inline editing, live preview and preprocessor support features.

You don't have to fire up Xcode or download the Android SDK to build an app for yourself that you can use anywhere. For less complex programs -- in my case, a companion app for a board game -- you can open your web development IDE of choice and build something that should be more than adequate for your needs (and shareable if required).

Learning HTML is important for web development, whether you want to build a personal web site, or you're looking to make a career out of it. It's important to commit important tags and terms to memory, but it's also important to make sure you're not using outdated tags and code. This cheat sheet makes sure you don't.

Don't like the way a site looks or want to add some code to enhance it? Tomado is a simple webapp for modding a site to your liking.

If you want to format a blog post or edit a web page, it's helpful to know HTML (even if your site platform offers WYSIWYG formatting). This HTML Cheat Sheet shows you all the essential tags you should know.

We've all come across pastebin sites before. They allow you to dump a bunch of text in one place that you can quickly and easily share with someone else. NoteHub does the same thing, but it comes with the added benefit of supporting HTML markup.

The infant daughter of a Sydney-based web developer has just made headlines for her predilection for HTML coding. While most toddlers stick to picture books, 17-month old Mia prefers HTML tags on her iPad: she can even identify the tags she has seen on her mother’s computer screen. Mia is obviously a special case, but it's not that uncommon for people in the dev community to begin coding at an early age. Were you a prodigy too?

It's common practice to fill web sites with dummy text during development, and the temptation to include a few inside jokes can be strong. This screen grab from a Melbourne Metro Trains site prototype reminds us that approach might become a little embarrassing when those jokes become public.

Marking up content on web sites to indicate structure is a good idea for enhancing its attractiveness to search engines. Google's new Structured Data Markup Helper lets you identify specific types of data on your site and then shows you the HTML you should use to embed that structure on your page.

Hi Lifehacker, I am a major geek and love fixing friends' laptops and phones and designing stuff for them. I've been asked to design a website for a company; I'm only a novice with HTML. How much should I charge to build them a website, considering it's my first time professionally? Thanks, Budding Builder

An embroidery advice site so poorly coded that it resembles an infinite Star Wars credit scroll has become an unlikely internet meme. Laughter and surrealism aside, it serves as a reminder that even the most basic site needs checking.

Google heavily promotes the WebP image format as a means of shrinking online image sizes, but not all graphics programs can easily create it. If you need a WebP image, you can easily create one online using a Google URL hack.