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June 2004: The Business Logic of Web Standards.

The MANOVERBOARD Telegraph, No. 13.

Welcome to the June 2004 Telegraph, the home of MANOVERBOARD news and views. This month we briefly look at the business value of using Web Standards.

The Business Logic of Web Standards

We're often asked about Web standards and why MANOVERBOARD is an advocate for their use in developing websites.

First an explanation. Web standards are a group of technological specifications that allow website designers and developers to increase the effectiveness of a site and reduce its maintenance and upating costs. The term "web standards" applies to a GROUP of technologies: HTML 4, XHTML 1.0 and 1.1, CSS 1 and 2, XML 1, DOM 1, ECMA script (standardized Javascript), etc. Many of these are not new. What's new is adequate browser support.

A site built to Web standards allows a tremendous amount of control over the way in which text, images, and other content are displayed in a browser. In general, XHTML (the most recent version of HTML) is used to "markup" the text and images while CSS is used to style them. In keeping the XHTML pages and the CSS page separate, a Web standards-compliant site loads faster, ensures better search engine indexing, and increases the sites accessibility to the visually and otherwise impaired.

Then what's the business logic of Web standards? Why should a company or organization use Web standards in building its site instead of the old, quick-and-dirty method? There are four main reasons:

  • Maintenance: Because standards-compliant sites separate content from style, changing text and images is simple, logical, and rule-based. A new paragraph will be formatted just like the previous paragraph. An additional image will be spaced apart from the text just like the one above or below it. This saves work.
  • User Experience: Standards-compliant sites use very little HTML code. This means that a site loads much more quickly in a browser (as much as 50% faster) which means, in turn, that visitors are not frustrated by long page downloads. This saves customers.
  • Updates: Separating out a website's structure (XHTML) from its presentation (CSS) allows changes to a website's fonts, borders, colors, navigation, and other formatting to become very simple. For instance, if a website owner wants all main text to change from black to blue, one change of the CSS will take care of it. In other words, using CSS, an entire site's paragraph text can be changed to another color in about 10 seconds time. Built without Web standards, the same change could take hours of work because every line of code will need to be examined. This saves labor costs.
  • Future-Proofing: Web standards compliance means that the underlying code is valid. A site built to Web standards does not use messy, illogical or specialized code. This, in turn, ensures that as the Web evolves, the valid XHTML code used will continue to be valid. New browsers will work with this code. And hiring a new designer or developer, when the time comes, will be easier as the site's code is documented, easy to understand, and, again, valid. This saves future development costs.
  • Accessibility: Last but not least, standards-compliant sites can serve the disabled, which make up, according to a 1999 U.S. Government report, at least 10% of the population in the U.S. This demographic includes those with visual, hearing, or dexterity-related disabilities. This saves frustration.

The one additional cost to a standards-based site comes in the initial development stage. Building sites with Web standards requires more work up front -- a standards-compliant site cannot currently be created using off-the-shelf software like FrontPage. By definition, standards-compliant sites require rigorous testing to ensure they use valid code and display well. And Web standards means that a site is professionally-built by a Web practitioner that cares about how sites are visited, read, and experienced.

More information about Web standards can be found on our site. There are also many, many online resources devoted to the topic. A few of the better ones that have attracted some notice include:

If you'd like more information about Web standards, please contact us.