Hollis Bartlett, Web Design, Development & Production in Amherst, Nova Scotia

Do Web standards give organizations a return on investment? Does the transition to XHTML and CSS make financial sense? The answer to those questions is yes.

Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is a technology often used in sites with many pages to make aesthetic changes easier. The style sheet is an exterior file that runs interdependently with the HTML (or outputted HTML) of a site. The style sheet serves as a template for the entire site’s color and font schemes, while also controlling borders, sizes, and more. Being able to edit a single file, instead of 100s of changes in many files saves time, errors, ensures consistency and separates design from content.

Another of the technologies becoming more popular is Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML. XHTML is an extension of HTML 4.0, and has become quite prevalent. XHTML conforms to standards moreso than HTML. As such, it is more search-engine and user-friendly:XHTML documents conform to XML. XML Tools can double as XHTML tools. XHTML is an extension of HTML 4.0. It is more user-friendly and streamlined than HTML. XHTML is a combination of HTML and XML in that it can run scripts and applets that use both the HTML and XML DOM (Document Object Model). As XHTML grows, XHTML 1.0 documents will be able to interoperate among other XHTML documents making it a more browser transitional language.

Though the sheer ease of creating HTML pages has clearly been beneficial to the Web’s growth, it’s also been a curse. Because they’re so forgiving, Web browsers have facilitated a system of pseudo-code that breaks countless best practices in the programming world.

For years, the standards community has been extolling the virtues of keeping visual design separate from content, but logically linked to each page. This means your HTML becomes ridiculously simple. Most XHTML pages are little more than a collection of semantically rich <div> and <p> tags, with a pointer to a powerful CSS file. This clean separation makes it much easier to develop and maintain your pages in the future, primarily because the division corresponds to the distinctions between design and editorial work.

Clean code pays even more dividends. Browsers that don’t offer compliant CSS implementations can now simply skip the style. In other words, semantic XHTML markup can be rendered in any browser — including non-traditional clients like mobile phones, PDAs, voice interfaces and screen readers, and anything else that supports the most basic tag set. As we have no idea what the future holds in store for other devices or even operating systems and web browsers, your clean semantic design will ensure longevity for the future, and ease of updating or upgrading your existing site as well. Updating the actual look and feel of a website is even possible without touching the actual html pages!

Cold, hard cash is easy to quantify, but there are additional benefits to slimming down code. It’s no secret that a faster, more lively site will nearly always translate to a better overall user experience. Often, making a webpage W3-compliant is the first step of search engine optimization, a marketing tool to get the most out of your advertising dollar.

Huge interfaces squeezed through plodding modem connections have been a plague since the Web’s inception. The increasing dominance of broadband has only helped a bit. A hotel phone line plugged into a business traveler’s laptop may be the only tenuous link you’ve got to a new customer. Adopting clean, standardized code gives users a shortcut to accomplishing their goals at your site.

The economic benefits of standardization are tangible. Once we can quantify them, businesses will begin realize the true promise of the Web — interoperable content freely shared.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.