Web Standards
Web standards and accessibility seem to be big buzz words in web development at the moment. An ever-growing number of sites now adhere to the W3C (that's World Wide Web Consortium) recommendations, and it would appear that unless we want to get left behind, a site re-launch is required. But why is there such a sway of opinion towards this approach, what exactly are these recommendations, and what improvements do they bring to a site?
To answer these questions we need to consider why HTML was first created and what it was designed to be used for. The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 whilst he was working at the CERN particle physics laboratories in Switzerland. The initial goal of the newly-invented HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was to allow researchers from remote sites all over the world to organise and pool together information. It included some very basic formatting but was essentially just a simple way for various academic institutions to share text based documents.
As the web became more popular and commercialised, web pages turned into marketing tools and suddenly there was a huge demand for greater freedom of formatting, so web developers started getting inventive with the way they coded pages. They began to hack up the html, taking elements such as the <table> tag (which was initially only intended for displaying basic tabular data) and using it with ever increasing complexity for entire page layouts, and then splicing up images and other content so that it would fit into this crazy array of table cells. This resulted in ridiculously over bloated code as page designs became ever more complex.
Then came CSS (cascading style sheets) and all that changed. The idea of CSS and the W3C's standards based approach is to separate style from content. HTML holds the content and describes it semantically (ie. this is a paragraph, this is a heading etc.) CSS then tells the browser how to display this content (eg. use the font 'arial' for all headings, and 'verdana' for all paragraphs).
There are numerous advantages to this approach, for example, it results in a reduction in file sizes (the HTML code is much cleaner now that we have got rid of all those tables and therefore user download times are less). The cleaner html code also makes it easier for search engines to understand your pages, and therefore give your site a better ranking.
However, arguably the biggest advantage of a standards based approach is accessibility. A standards based web site is built so that it can be accessed by everyone, not just those using top of the range PCs running the most up-to-date version of the latest browser over a super fast broadband connection, but everyone. Every browser that has ever been built can understand clean simple HTML; from the earliest DOS-based text browser, to the screen reader software used by people with limited or no vision. The pages might not look the same, some browsers might not be able to understand the CSS at all, but they will always be able to display the unformatted content of the site as it appears in the html documents. It is even possible to specify which style sheet to use depending on the type of device the page is being viewed on, this means it is possible to give someone using a mobile phone or other handheld device a different presentation of the same information, designed specifically for the smaller screen they are viewing it on. Equally it is possible to specify a different style sheet for a printed version of a page, meaning the days of the "click here for a printer friendly version" are numbered, users should simply have to click on their browsers print button to receive a version of the document that was designed for a printer.
It should be noted that CSS is not without it's problems. Style sheets get interpreted in different ways and numerous hacks and work arounds are required to make the page display correctly, not just in each different browser, but in each different version of each different browser. Internet Explorer 5 for mac might render a page entirely differently to Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. Most web developers would probably agree that Microsoft's Internet Explorer tends to be the one that throws up the most problems in that it does not interpret the W3C guidelines as strictly as other browsers. However, Internet Explorer has the largest market share by quite some margin so Microsoft are in a position to set their own standards. Despite this the Microsoft behemoth does seem to be slowly coming round to the idea of taking note of the W3C and the rest of the web development community, and as a result we are expecting much better support for web standards in the soon-to-be-released Internet Explorer 7.
Whatever your opinion is of web standards the tide does seem to be flowing in that direction at the moment. It is up to you whether you go with the flow or see how long you can hold back the flood gates.
If you have any questions or comments about this article, or anything else on the site please feel free to email me at info@prwdesigns.co.uk.