Proper Design with Web Standards

As the web con­tin­ues to grow the con­cern over how inef­fi­cient our web design prac­tices and pro­ce­dures are is becom­ing very evi­dent. Tech­nolo­gies such as WYSIWYG edi­tors includ­ing Front­Page and Dreamweaver are not help­ing the cause to make more effi­cient, leaner web­sites. So, how are we to approach mak­ing web­sites that decrease band­width, improve scal­a­bil­ity, and lower main­te­nance costs? The answer lies in web standards.

The W3C has pushed a series of web stan­dards that are a vital part of where the web is going. The orga­ni­za­tion was started by Tim Berners-Lee the gen­tle­men who scaled down SGML into the pop­u­lar HTML has now real­ized that his orig­i­nal inven­tion is not being used as it was intended. HTML was never meant to be a formatting/presentation lan­guage. HTML has been bas­tardized by the use of font, bold, and other for­mat­ting tags; and now Tim is push­ing his orga­ni­za­tion to move the web back to the orig­i­nal mean­ing of HTML as a struc­tural lan­guage. Enter XML.

XML then becomes the aim of all things web design. XML is often mis­un­der­stood by those who don’t under­stand the aim of using this lan­guage. This lan­guage is meant to be solely a struc­tural lan­guage as HTML was intended to be. Pre­sen­ta­tion is then sep­a­rated into XSL which defines bold, italic, and other for­mat­ting to the XML doc­u­ment. But the impor­tant thing to notice is that they are sep­a­rate. The last aspect is behav­ior. Behav­ior is how the doc­u­ment reacts in a client-side fash­ion; this includes lan­guages like JavaScript and VBScript (now the stan­dard is ECMAScript and the DOM), but these lan­guages have to been amal­ga­mated with pre­sen­ta­tion and for­mat­ting. So now the focus is to sep­a­rate struc­ture, pre­sen­ta­tion, and behavior.

But we are in a time where tran­si­tion is needed. Mil­lions upon mil­lions of web design­ers are not going to just move every­thing to XML, because (1) there is a lack of under­stand­ing, (2) it takes time and money to re-train and con­vert con­tent, and (3) it doesn’t cur­rently offer the pre­sen­ta­tion fea­tures many web design­ers desire. There­fore, the W3C has CSS while tran­si­tion­ing to XSL and XHTML while tran­si­tion­ing from HTML to XML (hence the X in front of the HTML). XHTML is the first step in encour­ag­ing web design­ers to sep­a­rate the pre­sen­ta­tion from con­tent and behav­ior, and it also uses the syn­tax of XML such as clos­ing all tags, all tags being low­er­cased, etc. CSS has already become a robust pre­sen­ta­tion lan­guage used by most web design­ers today. In fact, many new ver­sions of WYSIWYG edi­tors now do the pre­sen­ta­tion through CSS.

So, why should you care about web stan­dards, and how can you con­vince your cus­tomers to uti­lize them? The best list of rea­sons for web stan­dards are from a book by Jef­frey Zeld­man called Design­ing With Web Stan­dards:

  • Slash design, devel­op­ment, and qual­ity assur­ance costs (or do great work in spite of con­strained budgets)
  • Deliver superb design and sophis­ti­cated func­tion­al­ity with­out wor­ry­ing about browser incompatibilities
  • Set up your site to work as well five years from now as it does today
  • Redesign in hours instead of days or weeks
  • Wel­come new vis­i­tors and make your con­tent more vis­i­ble to search engines
  • Stay on the right side of acces­si­bil­ity laws and guidelines
  • Sup­port wire­less and PDA users with­out the has­sle and expense of mul­ti­ple versions
  • Improve user expe­ri­ence with faster load times and fewer com­pat­i­bil­ity headaches
  • Sep­a­rate pre­sen­ta­tion from struc­ture and behav­ior, facil­i­tat­ing advanced pub­lish­ing workflows

This is just an entry-level look at web stan­dards and the goal of them. I would sug­gest the fol­low­ing resources for under­stand­ing more of this impor­tant trend.

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