Web Standards
In a nutshell, web standards are the collective name given to the recommendations and guidelines issued by the W3C to help unify the web, ensuring that web content is accessible and readable across all platforms, all devices and by all people now, and in the future. The W3C, responsible for issuing these web standards, is lead by the inventor of the Internet, Tim Berners Lee, a full time staff and global member organisations including Time Warner AOL, Apple, Adobe, Sun Micro Systems and even Microsoft!
Building websites that are "standards compliant" (i.e. adhere to the web standards issued by the W3C) is crucial to the future success of a website. However, many designers and developers still publish websites that are not standards compliant and believe web standards to be limiting and claim they stifle creativity. Those that hold that view are usually those who have little idea of how the web works and are simply out to make a quick buck!
The old way of building websites
To understand the importance of being standard, it's useful to understand how websites used to be built, and in some cases still are today. When the web was in it's early years designers would make use of HTML tables to layout a web page. A table is rather like a spreadsheet in that it is divided into squares or "data cells", into which designers would place their content. Tables would be placed inside of tables (known as nested tables) to achieve the designer's look. However, tables are designed to display tabular data with columns and rows, just like a spreadsheet. Their use was misappropriated because they afforded the designer a precise way of positioning graphics and textual content on a page and ensured a uniform look across most browsers.
Building a website with a table based layout like this lends itself to many disadvantages compared to one that is standards compliant, including:
- Accessibility. Devices that don't understand how to display the table data properly will often present a jumbled mess making content difficult to be read and understood, effectively limiting the amount of visitors who can access your website. Less visitors equates to less visibility which means fewer paying customers!
- People with disabilities. Visitors who are visually impaired or who are using a screen reader will not be able to understand the content because the document won't be semantically structured.
- Slower. The sheer amount of data needed to generate a table based layout is vast compared to a standards compliant layout which make the pages load slower. You may not think this a problem in the modern age of broadband but consider that over half of those accessing web pages do so with a mobile device and not a traditional broadband-connected computer then it becomes another important factor.
- Harder to maintain. Due to the amount of data of a table based web page, it is much more time consuming to maintain and update them. The simplest changes quickly become a nightmare.
- Poorer search engine results. Google and other major search engines are very clever at picking out the content of a web page and assessing its content. However a table based layout is much more difficult for a search engine to understand and often results in poor search engine results.
Building standards compliant websites
All of the web projects built by Redup Digital Media are standards compliant. So how does this benefit you? To begin with it eliminates all of the problems associated with the old school methods of building websites described above. It also affords you and your customers many more advantages, including accessible content for visitors who may have disabilities such as impaired vision. The importance of being standard goes far beyond simply making your website available to users with disabilities.
One of the cornerstone guidelines issued by the W3C is to separate presentation from document markup. In layman's terms this simply means ensuring that the instructions for how big the type face is or what colour the background of a page should be, is kept separate from the raw content like headings and paragraphs. This is achieved by using CSS and XHTML. Cascading Style Sheets or CSS for short, is the set of instructions or "styles" that tell the XHTML document (the web page) how to display fonts, colours, images etc.
Fig 1.1
This shows how the document is kept separate from the instructions that define colours, positioning of graphics, font types etc. Stage 3 shows the resulting web page when you put 1 and 2 together.
Keeping presentational style separate from content means that those devices and browsers that understand the presentational layer of document can display it to the user, and those that don't, such as some mobile phones, will present the user with semantically formatted raw content.
Fig 1.2
If the device being used to access the web page cannot read or understand the CSS, it is bypassed altogether and instead the user is presented with the raw content. Stage 3 shows how some mobile devices, screen readers and PDA's will view the web page content, without the presentational layer. This is also how a search engine will view the page!
It is this method of separating raw content from style that allows the web page content to be accessible. Put another way, no matter what device, browser, operating system your visitors, customers and prospects are using, they will always be able to view the raw content of the site now, and in the future.
Further reading
If you're interested in web standards and want to find out more, you may find the following links to other websites useful:
- World Wide Consortium (W3C): http://www.w3.org
- The Web Standards Project: http://www.webstandards.org
- The Web Accessibility Initiative: http://www.w3.org/WAI
