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Web standards

Using Web Standards, websites load faster, work better, and are easier to update and maintain. This website and other MANOVERBOARD websites are designed with Web standards. There's no murky markup to confound search engines, no nested tables that slow the website's load-time, and no junk code that make updates complicated. The end result is that standards-based sites, like this one, are cleaner, leaner, and are more thoughtfully designed, developed, and produced.

What are Web standards?

Simply, Web standards is an agreed-upon language that provides clear and comprehensive guidelines for coding websites. Not all websites use Web standards; perhaps only 3% do at the time of this writing (April 2007). (You can read more about Andrew Boardman's take on standards in The Business Logic of Web Standards.)

With Web standards, sites load quickly and perform more gracefully within browsers. More technically, a Web standards-compliant site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for its design and presentation and Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) for its content and structure.

Coding with Web standards: an example

Web site code can be mind-bogglingly complicated, but it doesn't have to be. With Web standards, the look and layout of the page is handled behind the scenes, in a separate stylesheet, rather than in the HTML code of the page. As a result, pages load faster and are far easier to create and edit.

For example, a typical line of text on a poorly coded HTML website might look like this:

<table border=0 width=99% cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0>
<tr>
<td><font size="1"
face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" color="#000000">
Learn more about the power and flexibility of Web standards.</font></td>
</tr>
</table>

That same line of text coded in XHTML with Web standards would look like this:

<p>Learn more about the power and flexibility of Web standards.</p>

Why Web standards?

The easiest way to demonstrate the efficiency of using CSS and XHTML is this: One small change of the style sheet can immediately modify an entire site's styling. For instance, changing all paragraph text throughout a site from black to dark blue can take a few minutes with Web standards. Before Web standards, such a modification might take a half a day of work, or more.

Web standards are the future of the web

Some of the many benefits of Web Standards include:

  • Inherent search engine optimization and higher search rankings
  • Streamlined production and maintenance
  • Faster download and rendering of Web pages
  • Compatibility with future Web browsers
  • Better accessibility for alternative browsers such as screen readers and handheld devices
  • No need for separate, print-friendly pages

More information

There are many organizations that are advancing Web standards, the lead one being the World Wide Web Consortium, which establishes worldwide specifications for Web standards. Other organizations include the Web Standards Project. A few excellent and practical resources on Web standards include the maccaws.org Primer and Jeffrey Veen's The Business Value of Web Standards.

A few well-known sites recently built with Web standards include:

If you have any questions about Web standards, feel free to contact us.