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.