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A Case For Web Standards

By Matt Gifford—Timeshifting Principal.

The business benefits of adopting web standards on your next web project or redesign.

What are web standards?

Web pages are created in HTML (Hypertext mark-up language), and there are two styles of mark-up in use today, traditional and web standards based. Traditional mark-up whilst easy and convenient to use has a number of disadvantages. Font, layout and colour information is embedded in each page which is built from multiple nested tables (Grids where content can be placed, similar to Microsoft Excel). This makes the pages difficult to maintain, edit and also results in larger overall file size (and hence slower page downloads). Secondly because pages aren't designed to any particular standard, page display can vary markedly between different web browsers, errors in the mark-up are difficult to detect and new browser versions would often break the pages.

Web standards based mark-up solves all these issues and has a number of other advantages:

  • the separation of site content and presentation/layout
  • the independence from and between web browsers
  • the quality and simplicity of the underlying XHTML code
  • the independence from proprietary lock-in

In the paragraphs below we'll go into these in detail and outline the reasons why it is prudent to those a web standards and a development company that has adopted web standards for your next web project or redesign.

Project Development Speed & Maintenance

In today's competitive economy getting a project to market faster makes business sense, it reduces time resources are tried up and reduces costs. Web standards ease development time in several ways. Because the pages are designed to a specific standard, a validator can be used to automatically locate any coding errors. This saves a significant amount of time in the testing and QA phase of development, which lowers overall development cost and time to market.

Another advantage of web standards is that design and content is separated so that to a degree both the content and design layout can be produced simultaneously. Previous the content mark-up had to wait till the design template coding had been completed. This separation of layout/design and content also reduces the costs of any future site updates. Since the html pages only contain the content and minimal or no design/color/layout information, it is a far simpler task to change the look of the site, or restructure the content organisation.

Speeding development is a competitive and financial advantage. Shorter development times not only reduce costs, but free resources sooner, thereby increasing opportunity.

Cross Browser & Platform Compatibility

All major web browsers are now standards compliant, which gives a standards based site a considerable advantage over traditional mark-up—consistent display on a wide range of web browser/platform combinations, with no additional work. With traditional mark-up developers often end up building multiple versions of their sites, attempting to present a perfect design for as many users as possible. Obviously creating more than one version of the same content is not the most cost effective option.

Traditional mark-up sites often employ browser sniffing (detecting what web browser a user is using) and serving a variant of the site based on this. Whilst this seems like an acceptable solution, this browser detection code seldom copes with new browser versions, results in ongoing maintenance headache. Pages build with web standards will work correctly in any current or future web browsers, without modification, which reduces the site's total cost of ownership.

Improve Site Speed

Traditional mark-up uses a multitude of font definitions, tables, and dozens of little images to hold together the design layout. These are embedded in every single page of the site, and add to the download time of each page. Standards based does anyway with this redundancy and delivers lean functional pages that are often less than half the size of their traditional counterparts and smaller file sizes equal faster loads. And there's no such thing as a site that loads too fast. A hotel phone line plugged into a business traveller's laptop may be the only thin link you've got to a new customer. When people visit your site they want information and they want it fast, the faster you can deliver it the best position you'll be in to capitalize on that interaction.

Smaller page sizes don't just make the site faster, they also reduce bandwidth costs. For larger sites with substantial traffic, this could translate into real savings. ESPN is an example of a large site that has realized the benefits of using Web Standards.

Accessibility and Easy Indexing by Search Engines

With clean standards code browsers that don't offer compliant CSS implementations can now simply skip the style. In other words, standards mark-up can be rendered in any browser—including atypical clients like mobile phones, PDA's and screen readers, and anything else that supports the basic XHTML tag set. A standards-compliant site also solves the problem with mobile access, Section 508 accessibility and past-version browser compatibility without maintaining multiple versions of the site and without a great deal of additional development time.

Standards based code also makes the site easier to access by another atypical client; the search engine spider. By removing the any necessary presentational mark-up from the HTML files, search engines are given exactly what they want—just the content. Plus spiders are quite intolerant of erroneous mark-up, a problem alleviated by the validation process, which guarantees prefect code. By creating a site that is easier to index increases the chance of the spider indexing further into each page and deeper into the site in general.

Why choose standards based development

Many developers still struggle with on traditional mark-up and its many disadvantages. The main reason is a change to standards based development is not a straight forward one. The standards based development process is quite foreign to most traditional developers, and standards based mark-up behaves rather differently too—which is often frustrating to the new developer. The switch to web standards requires a fairly substantial investment in time and resources, which in most cases must be absorbed by the development company. But those that have made the switch have realised that is in the best interests of their customers and themselves to produce standards based sites; sites that give their customers better value for money and long term ROI.

Additional Reading

Why tables for layout is stupid
This is an excellent presentation comparing traditional and web standards based design methods—and the cartoons are quite funny too.
http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/

Web Standards Project
The official web standards homepage.
http://www.webstandards.org/

 Matt Gifford

Matt Gifford

Founder and Managing Director

Matt studied Computer Science, Philosophy and Film at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

Philosophy is a useful problem solving skill, as it trains one to approach problems from an unique perspective and come up with solutions that are not immediately obvious.

Matt was born in New Zealand and has travelled to most parts of the world. He enjoys triathlon, multi-sport and rock-climbing.