Why we build Standard Compliant Websites
What is so important about designing websites with standards?
- your pages load faster
- your hosting costs are less
- you can redesign the look of your site more efficient and less expensively
- you maintain visual consistency throughout your site
- you are easier to find with Google
- your site looks good on a cell phone browser a computer screen, and on new gadgets yet to be invented
What are these standards?
If you are shopping around for a web developer, ask if they will build your site up to standard. Here is the jargon:
- html 4.1 Strict or Transitional xhtml1.0
- Cascading Style Sheets (for presentation)
- Javascript (for user convenience)
- attention to Section 508 and WAI guidelines for widest posible audience usability
So if standards are so great, why don't the other guys bother with them?
The short answer is that they have fewer skills, and don't keep up with the industry. Below is a bit of a longer answer.
The first web users were scientists and engineers. Web pages were displayed on text only browsers. Fancy looking pages were of little interest. A web page could contain 6 levels of headers, paragraphs, lists, tables (more on this below!) and very few other things. Web pages were used to present scientific papers in a very typical format: A title, some text, a subtitle, some more text, etc. There was no need for magazine style page layouts.
When the web caught on in a big way with early versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, those two companies battled to add features to the original web 'language' (html) which would let page creators build web pages with pictures, and other fancy doo-dads. These early browsers did not conform to modern standards. Many easy to use tools for creating web pages were created during this period (FrontPage, etc.) These tools all use a 'trick' to layout web pages. Because scientists often present information in tables, a method for displaying tables was built in to web pages from the beginning. Later on, people (and tool builders) realized that if they layed out a page as a grid (like a table), and then took each individual table cell and layed it out as a smaller table, they could put text and pictures in all of the different squares. Look below at a portion of a New York Times web page. The red dots outline the table cells.
There are good things about doing page layout with tables. First, you can use a tool to do it without having any technical skill. Second, if you are willing to create enough little squares, you can define a very precise layout.
However, pages made this way don't show up well in search engines. They are a nightmare to edit and maintain. They look awful if the reader doesn't have a large enough screen.
Since those days, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have been invented and adopted as a standard. Using CSS to style web pages makes pages smaller and so they load faster. It makes them much easier to update too. But, to use CSS to make web pages you need to be a professional and understand what is 'going on under the hood'. There are lots of people you can find who can build your website. Many of these don't have the skill to use CSS and the other standards. They won't tell you that in their sales pitch of course because they probably don't even know better. So, we told you!