Designing with Web Standards
What are ‘web standards’?
Web standards is a term that has been gaining increasingly popularity in recent years. The standards are those set down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) whose mission it is:
To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.
These standards aim to make the web available to everyone on as many different devices as possible. With the increase in popularity of adhering to these standards has come a movement away from what, up until now, has been ‘traditional’ web design: table-based layouts with presentation mixed in with content that is often inaccessible to people with various disabilities and not much liked either by search engines who have to wade through unnecesssary markup to get to your content.
Web standards is about making the web accessible to as wide a variety of users and devices as possible and involves using valid and accessible code, semantically correct markup, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to separate content from presentation.
Valid code is that which has been checked and passed using one of the W3C’s validation services. Why use valid code? Because it goes a long way towards ensuring your site looks good in the plethora of browsers available as well as newer devices enabled for viewing the Internet, such as mobiles or handhelds. It also means your site is going to be easier to use for people who might have disabilities.
When creating a website, you want it to be available and usable to as many people as possible. This includes those who may have disabilities that affect their vision, mobility or understanding. Using valid and accessible code (which also involves the use of semantically correct markup, i.e. choosing the correct tag to accurately describe the type of content) makes this possible. As a positive side-effect, these practices also make your web pages more attractive to other devices like screen readers, text browsers and search engines.
What is CSS?
Cascading Style Sheets work like a template allowing web designers to define styles for HTML and then apply it to as many web pages as they like. The aim is to remove all presentation from the HTML code, leaving it clean and semantically correct.
But what does all this really mean?
As all this coding stuff takes place behind the scenes of a web page, what does it really mean to the user and/or the client?
Well, there are a number of benefits of using CSS and designing for web standards:
- Easier to make site-wide changes (one CSS file controls the whole site) which means less maintenance.
- Less code which means:
- smaller files
- faster download (less time waiting)
- less bandwidth usage - cheaper hosting costs
- Search engines can index your pages more easily.
- Content is accessible to a wider range of people and devices.
- Users can customise a site to their own needs by using style switchers which can increase text sizes or change colours.
