Web Standards

Web Standards

In my last post I mentioned something called web standards. For anyone unfamiliar with this term, this post is for you.

The term web standards refers to a set of standardised best practices used when building websites; some benefits to using them include virtually eliminating in most cases problems encountered when a website doesn’t display correctly in different Internet browsers, reducing website loading time and so on. For a fairly brief overview on some of whats involved, see below.

Separation of Structure and Presentation

The first step is the separation of the structure of a web page (the foundations of a page, usually written in HTML or XHTML, which define where each individual section and element appears on the page in relation to eachother) from the presentation (the design and appearance, such as colours, sizes and shapes and over-all design of the structural sections. This is written in CSS as a separate document and linked inside the web document.)

This might sound like a lot of extra work than putting everything in one document, but the benefits are worth any effort involved. The main benefit is that this method means that any future editing, updating or error fixing becomes totally painless; I’ll give you an example:

Lets say I have several different paragraphs of text all over my website, on different pages, all told in each individual paragraph on each page, to be coloured red. Now for some reason I have to go and change the colour of these paragraphs from red to blue; this would mean wading in page after page of code to look for each part of the coding which tells the text to be red and change it all by hand - a lot of unnecessary time and energy wasted!

Now, if I had decided to keep one single entry on a separate CSS document that tells every paragraph all over my website how to appear (a sort of ‘master control’ that can issue orders to everything under its authority), I now only have to change one small line of code and have every single one of these paragraphs all over my website change with it instantly. As you can see, if I had hundreds of these paragraphs scattered all over hundreds of pages, it would involve a massive amount of work.

XHTML and CSS Validation

The next step is to validate your newly separated structural documents and presentation documents; validation involves entering the URL of the document through a validation service such as the W3C Markup Validation Service. This is in some ways similar to running through your word processing documents through a spell checker, in that it points out any errors, conflicts or omissions present in the document and informs you of whats required to address the problem.

All of the things and other techniques used to bring a website up to standard mean that the finished product will be more polished, professional and complete from the very beginnings of its creation to the final stages of design and implimentation; it will also be more reliable to visitors and end-users, no matter what browser they decide to use or whatever settings they may have in place on their computer.

Conclusion

In short, implimenting web standards on your old website or having a new site produced with them in mind is a decision that benefits both customer and business alike, also being a decision which takes into account the future of the Internet and what users are coming to expect from modern websites.

Tags: Around the Web, CSS, W3C, Web Standards, Website Validation, XHTML

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