RSS FeedWhat Web standards are, the benefits and why it is important to you
W3C Web Standards:
The W3C is the organizing group that gives the specification for Web standards and guidelines that basically make the foundation for good usability, accessibility, SEO and browser friendly design among many other things. The structure used to create web standards compliant pages consist of building a site with proper web standards technologies such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and semantic XHTML markup. Using this model allows you to separate the content of the site from the presentation of the site. You are able to modify anywhere from a single design element to the entire look of a web site via editing one or two CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files.Benefits of using web standards & CSS/XHTML structured pages include:
- Between 30-70% file size reduction
- In contrast to table based sited layouts which contain multiple nested and bloated table code to define structure which is downloaded on every page, CSS layouts only download the layout defining CSS file once. Thus resulting in a much reduced file size per page as the style design & layout do not have to be downloaded on every page.
- Reduced bandwidth costs
- Loading of web pages becomes much faster with smaller sizes, cleaner code & structured content. Pages become more responsive and quicker thus creating a snappier, more usable and pleasing experience for the end user.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- There are many out there who don’t know exactly what search engine optimization means. Some would think the name itself is self explanatory but what does it really mean? Making a website search engine optimized is simply semantically structuring the site and its content in a manner that allows search engines to spider/index the contents of a website easily and efficiently. This gives a website better ranking on searc h engines on searches for relevant content and exposing it to a large web audience. By using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to dictate the style, design and presentation of a site and semantic XHTML markup to distinguish the content you can achieve this.
Compatibility
Web standards keeps web sites cross platform and cross browser compatible. Catering to the disabled and providing access to a web sites content even with different browsers, browser versions on different operating systems viewed at different resolutions on various different hardware platforms.Usability
One of the biggest and prominent factors in the success of a web site is its usability. The question is will a web sites viewers be able to easily use the site? Will they understand how to quickly find the information they need or will they become frustrated and go to the sites competitors? Creating an effective, quick and easy usability experience for web viewers involves many things including:- The design and layout of a site.
- The content and placement of text & colors.
- Overall site color and schema.
- Navigation links, link wording and link placement.
- Site maps and search functions etc.
Usability is the key factor in deciding whether or not web site viewers will have a good experience with the site or not, this is equally as important as SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Accessibility
Accessibility plays an important role in a websites success as well by allowing people to view a site and its content on:
Multiple Browsers:
- Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Safari, Opera
Multiple Browser Versions:
- Internet Explorer: 5, 5.5, 6.0 – Netscape: 4, 4.5, 6, 7, 8 – Firefox: 0.5, 1, 1.5 – Safari: 1.0, 1.3, 2.0 – Opera: 6, 7, 8
Viewed at different screen resolutions:
- 1600×1200, 1280×1024, 1024×768, 800×600, 640×480
Viewed at different color depths:
- Millions of colors (32 bit), Thousands of colors (16 bit), Hundreds of colors (8 bit)
Used on multiple operating systems with various versions:
- Windows: 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, 2003
- Mac OS: 9, OS X: 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4
- Linux: Redhat Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE, Gentoo, Debian
- BSD: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD
- Mobile: Symbian OS, Palm OS, Windows CE, Pocket PC
On multiple devices and hardware:
- Standard x86 PC’s, Apple Macintosh PPC, Sun Microsystem SPARC, Palm PDA handhelds, Pocket PC PDA handhelds, Screen readers, Public terminal workstations, touch screen kiosks, Mobile phones.
Web standards not only providing access to the fully capable viewers but also to the large audience of disabled viewers. Those with types of blindness, impaired motorskills and various other disabilities will be able to access the content of a web standards compliant web site. This special audience also needs access to web information and should be catered to. This is one of the many goals of web standards accessibility.
As you can see there is quite a large audience to cater to on the web. By mixing and matching the different configurations above you’ll find a most complicated mesh of possible viewing environments by web views. Not everyone is going to have the latest hardware, the latest browser or the exact same configuration you have at work or home. It will all render slightly different in different viewing environments. Web standards doesn’t promise to make it look EXACTLY the same in every situation, what it does provide is it will be ACCESSIBLE in each situation. You’ll be able to at the bare minimum be able to easily access the content in a comprehendible way, which can’t be said for traditional site design layouts with no web standards and based on tables.
Thanks to web standards there is a much greater chance of pleasing the large range of web viewers. By using web standards we can assure our websites hold a future forward stand and foundation. Because the reason for a website being online at all is to provide some kind of information, content is king. With web standards we can make sure that the content is delivered and accessible to viewers no matter what hardware/software configuration they are using.