Why Design With Standards

Tim Berners-Lee’s dream for his invention, the World Wide Web, is a common space where users can share information to work together, to play, and to socialize (The World Wide Web, A very short personal history). As web developers, creating business, social, and educational sites, we turn this dream into reality.
What are web standards and why should I use them?

...But in this period of tremendous growth, the Web needs guidance to realize its full potential. Web standards are this guidance. These standards help ensure that everyone has access to the information we are providing, and also make web development faster and more enjoyable.

Standards compliance makes it easier for people with special needs to use the Web. Blind people may have their computer read web pages to them. People with poor eyesight may have pages rearranged and magnified for easier reading. And people using hand-held devices can browse the Web just as easily as those using high-end workstations.

As we will explain, there are also many practical reasons for developers to be concerned with web standards. Search engines can do a better job of indexing sites, for example. Using browser-specific code often doubles or triples the work to create web pages, and leaves a lot to be desired when new media are introduced. This situation will only get worse without the sound direction of web standards.

5 Years From Tables to CSS.  An excellent reference.

Below is an introduction and a downloadable video (asx) on Web Standards produced by the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. The video is a must see and essential to know what the web is evolving into and why many sites today are obsolete. It includes views of csszengarden, slashdot,  and other real world examples, print css, and overall view on using standards.

XHTML, CSS, W3C and Web Standards
Download video
Quick HTML Slide Presentation Tip: Click in purple-gray to change page.
Highlight: Epic Systems save $38,000.00/year changing to Web Standards in bandwidth alone.

Web Standards are neccessary in every online avenue. The below video demonstrates this in a related area giving a real world example of why Standards are required. This applies to websites and everything involved with information technology. Notice the refernces in this video to standards and interoperability using the example of the same data being rendered in five different clients. Using CSS and XHTML on your website is attaining this as we move into an XML world.

 

Visiting one of my favorite sites recently Mike Davidson’s an article there on their redesign of the ABC News site,  and about ABC changing to Web Standards caught my attention. There he defines changing the ABS News website to modern Web Standard one and makes it sensible and uses common sense.
The Web Standards Group defines it best:

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“The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call ‘web standards’, are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.”

Web Standards and the Enterprise:
Web Standards For Business

This article highlights the benefits of using Web standards for business sites (Internet, intranet and extranet sites). It is aimed at stakeholders from the marketing, communication and IT departments.

Within the scope of this article, we will address the following benefits that particularly apply to us:

• the separation of content and presentation
• the independence from Web browsers
• the quality and simplicity of the underlying HTML code
• the independence from proprietary lock-in

The most important benefit is the independence between the corporate content and its publication channels. Content that does not depend on presentation can be more easily disseminated through the various communications channels of a company. A press release created according to a common corporate standard will be easily published on its external Web site, its intranet portal, a mailing list, or an RSS news feed. It becomes truly possible to centralize content and reduce or eliminate duplicates without being limited by the medium of communication. Quite the contrary, by adopting Web standards, a company opens itself to a new breadth of existing media and emerging technologies that are based on these standards.

I have long had a vision for a newspaper site. The journalist enters the story as an article in Expression Engine. The reporter has permission to write, but only in draft. The main editor gets an email that new content has been added. He can then login and edit, approve, or reject the article, and classify where it goes using categories. After being finalized is published to the website. The same content, using an xml feed created in EE auomatically,  delivers the story, photos and all, to the printing press where it is interpreted and printed in the days newspaper version. It is also added to the websites RSS feed which can be picked up anywhere. One entry, multiple purposes. All automatically. Additionally, EE supports posting by email, from anywhere.

Proper HTML et al has always taken this into consideration. But the way we were writing code meant we made distinct sites of the same information for different browser/platform combinations. The number of combinations one needs to test for is currently insane, and is about to become impossible. Imagine your cel phone was only good to call other people with that cel service instead of anyone with a phone, and you get an inkling of what’s ahead. Or we can write standards compliant code.
Why?

NYPL - XHTML Guidelines & Benefits (New York Public Library) and also Better Living Through XHTML by J. Zeldman - AListApart.

Without using CSS and xhtml your site cannot be voice enabled (BKDesign will bring more on this soon), along with a dozen other benefits aside from saving you money…

For those who refuse to adapt, your sites will eventually stop working properly and it will be a lot of expense to change over. If you are developing a new site, looking into Web Standards now will save a LOT of grief and expense later. If you have a large site now, change over gradually and be ahead of the game. And don’t forget Accessibility which incidently comes with Standards.

See 99% of websites are obsolete by Jeffrey Zeldman. Written four years ago but still true.

A good article on Standards is at Alistapart:
From Table Hacks to CSS Layout: A Web Designer’s Journey

BBC looks at British Gov. Web Sites

The Southampton University report found that 61% of these websites did not fully comply with guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium, the organisation which creates web standards and guidelines.

Researchers said not complying with these guidelines could prevent some individuals from being able to access the websites

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“I hand code, but I’m a dying breed,” said Jeffrey Zeldman, group leader for WaSP. “At a recent Web conference I asked how many people in the audience hand-coded their Web sites. Five people out of a thousand raised their hands. Then I asked, ‘Who uses Dreamweaver?’ and the whole room raised their hands.

“These are all professionals, and if they’re all using Dreamweaver, and it isn’t generating standards-compliant markup and code, all the standards-compliant browsers in the world are not going to make the Web more standards compliant.”
Zeldman News.com 2001

Eleven years ago when I started doing websites, a very wise man advised me to learn hand coding. I still do so, and I thank him today in spite of all the headaches in the beginning.

 

To be continued…

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