WebspaceWorks Articles/News
Why web standards?
Benefits
- Faster load times
- More efficient documents using less code
- More amenable to search engines, so potentially better rankings
- Easy re-purposing for different devices
- Easily accommodates emerging accessibility legislation
- More design options and greater flexibility
- Centralised styling
- Easier update & maintenance
- Common dynamic effects do-able without javascript
Standards compliant websites efficiently deliver information to a majority of browsers, are fast to download, widely accessible and can be easily deployed across multiple viewing devices.
Standards allow quicker, easier and therefore cheaper maintainance, and yet the majority of websites are still developed using hybrid legacy techniques. This results in inefficient pages that are often painfully slow to load and time consuming and expensive to maintain.
In the beginning…
Browser support
The following browsers represent 90–95% of those in use today and all provide support for modern standards of web development (Listed in approximate order of most to the least capable).
Gecko based: [All platforms] Firefox 1.0+ (Mozilla): Considered state-of-the-art for CSS support.
Opera: [All platforms] v7+ (currently at v8) now very close to Gecko on css support. Buggy in earlier versions and platforms.
Safari 1.0+ & OmniWeb 4.5+: Mac only, built on Apple Computer’s WebCore, and becoming highly standards compliant.
Konqueror: Generally a capable CSS browser, with more recent versions receiving benefit from Apple’s Safari developments.
Internet Explorer: PC versions 5.0–5.5 support CSS but are buggy in some areas; IE 6 is better. On Mac IE 5.1+, though no longer actively developed, remains a better CSS browser than any version on the PC. IE7 currently in early beta testing looks likely to deliver better standards support
Netscape 4.*: Supports CSS, but is extremely buggy.
Initially the web was a text only place and the underlying language (html) supported a very limited set of formatting capabilities. Visually dull, the internet was however fast, with a very high substance to fluff ratio.
And then…
Then along came graphics, tables, demands for improved visual (and aural) impact and… browser-specific extensions to the underlying html language. Page layouts became more adventurous and with greater dependence upon graphics, but in so doing they became slow to download, complicated to construct and often “best viewed in browser XYZ”.
While ill-suited as a language in which to define layout and style, html nevertheless was, and still is used for just these tasks. The resulting “tag-soup” is a major contributor to bloated code and slow page load times.
Emergence of standards
Thankfully the W3C took control of html, were largely successful in removing browser specific extensions and in establishing common standards that browser manufacturers have been encouraged to support.
Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) emerged as a standard for defining presentation at about the same time that W3C took control of html. However, this standard did not enjoy wide support in browsers for a long time, that which did exist frequently being buggy and highly inconsistent from one browser to the next.
As a consequence, development of websites that made full use of the available standards did not prove viable, and the “tag-soup” approach has therefore continued to dominate development practice.
Doing things in style
Good support for CSS was finally realised in 2002. With around 95% of browsers now being sufficiently CSS capable, developing to the standard at last became a realistic possibility, with a number of advantages to be gained from doing so.
What are the advantages of doing so?
Speed and content rule the internet.
In getting away from yesterday’s “Tag-Soup”, documents immediately become simpler in structure and smaller in size.
Your pages will load faster, or carry more information for a given download size because the code is simply more compact, and therefore more efficient. Search engines also like this higher content to code ratio, since it gives a page more meaningful weight, leading to the potential to improve search ranking.
Placing all layout and styling into a single set of rules it is quicker, easier and cheaper to maintain and apply subsequent design changes to the site. This ability allows accessibility issues to be addressed through the provision of alternative styles within a browser, or for the site to be easily re-deployed across different devices that might include handheld devices, voice or braille readers.
The future of the internet goes beyond the PC and a browser. Standards compliance will improve the present, while simultaneously preparing for the future.
