Yeah I’m talking to you! Why everyone should care about web standards
As the name of the article suggests, this is for everyone.* By everyone I mean anyone who is involved in purchasing, building or managing a website. If you are in business, chances are you have a website. Perhaps you’ve have heard of web standards, but don’t know what they are. Well, know this; web standards are drastically changing the web design industry, and it is critical that anyone who has anything to with websites gets on board with implementing these standards. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you care about things like:
- Return on Investment
- Staying ahead of the competition
- Consistent online branding
- Responding to your customers
- Reaching the widest possible audience
- Meeting your legal obligations
- Preparing for the future
So you don’t know the jargon - that’s okay. In fact, this article is specifically meant for people who don’t toss around words DOM scripting, semantic mark-up or graceful degradation. This is meant for people who care about acheiving real benefits to their business.
A little history
Let’s take a step back for a moment. In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee created the internet. And the programming language that he created was called HTML. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. If you don’t know (don’t worry I promised no jargon), HTML is a very simple computer language that’s used to describe text in a way that a computer can understand. So simple in fact that web programmers don’t even like it being reffered to as a programming language. It’s beneath them because it’s so simple. They refer to it as a mark-up language. The beauty of HTML is it’s simplicity; because it was originally meant for academics to pass their research back and forth over the internet, it had to be so simple that anyone could use it. Basically it describes content. So if I want to make a heading - I wrap it in a heading tag. This way the computer knows its a heading. For example:
<h1>Here’s my heading</h1>
<p>And here’s my paragraph</p>
Not too difficult to grasp eh? However the problem came when the internet took off because businesses got involved and wanted to market themselves on the internet. Why was that a problem? Well, they didn’t want a plain old looking text document for their website, they wanted it branded like all their print materials. They wanted it designed! So what Tim Berners-Lee created in 1991 was now being forced to do things that it was never intended to do, like using multi-column layouts, and having background patterns and displaying images etc. It turned HTML into a hideous shadow of its former self. It was now a mess of code that was unreadable by most people.
Compound that with the fact that the browser war came into play in the mid-nineties. Now Internet Explorer and Netscape - and a host of browser manufactereurs to follow - were each trying to one-up each other by adding new features to their browsers. So your website might look good on Netscape, but render terribly if someone is using an older version of Internet Explorer.
The aftermath
The problems that resulted from this method of web design was astounding. Our websites are business critical and yet:
• They are expensive to redesign. What was once a fresh, original, unique design it now dated. However if you want to redesign your site it costs an extraordinary amount of money because the web team has to build it from the ground up. If you want to make a change to your site you need to have a web team to make those changes, and if that team isn’t in-house, it’s even more expensive.
I know what you’re saying - “But I have a content management system to make changes to my website”. Well, that helps to an extent. But it also leads us to another problem; it ruins your brand consistency. Now you have editors who are using a WYSIWYG interface to write content for your website who are bolding words, changing the colour of headings, using Comic Sans for the body font - it really is a mess.
• Another problem with the old method of web design is that you can’t reach the widest possible audience. Imagine for a moment that you own a shop. And every third or fourth person who comes into your shop, you turn away. Well a lot of websites that are around today do the very same thing. They don’t cater to how different people use the web and they only work on a select few browsers. So many are forced to leave your site or are frustrated because it’s not displaying correctly.
For instance many times we want to print a page of a website, and it cuts off half of the text column. Or how about when you want to copy text from a site and paste it into an email - only to find out that you can’t. Either the text is just an image or it’s in Flash. Now many people are browsing the web with mobile devices - is your website readable on those small screens? Most aren’t.
Believe it or not your current website may not be compatible with the laws in your country. Depending on where you live there are laws that dictate that people with visual disabilities must be able to access your site. If your website is not compliant with web standards, then chances are someone using screen reader is unable to “hear” the content of your web page. Most of us are happy to see that care has been put into a building so that it is accessible to people with physical handicaps - but how many websites are out there in which someone with a disability cannot use the site?
A final thing I’ll mention is that these inaccessible websites are not easily picked up by search engines. For many this can mean death for their business. If you can’t be googled than it’s likely that most people won’t find your site.
Alright, now we’re really depressed, right? We’ve gotten outselves into a big mess that we all have to live with. I’m pleased to tell you that it doesn’t have to be like that.
A sigh of relief
Thanks to the W3C - an organization that develops web languages, much like Tim Berner-Lee developed HTML - there are now standards in place that solve, or at least improve, most of the aforementioned problems with web design! You guessed it - web standards! So now instead of HTML being full of messy code that is unreadable by most people out there, with web standards your HTML remains simple, just like the way it was meant to be. It’s important to note that there are three elements that make up a web page:
- HTML
- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
- DOM Scripting
Oh wait! I said I wouldn’t get technical! Let’s redefine those three key elements into:
- Content (HTML)
- Design (CSS)
- Behavior (Dom Scripting)
Anything related to how your website looks is taken care of in a totally seperate place, leaving the HTML simple and readable. Also the behavior aspects of your site (ie: drop down menus, forms and things of that nature) are seperated from the HTML as well. So now instead of each document in your website being one big mess, these three elements are seperate from one another and much more usable.
This may be hard to visualize. For a perfect example go to CSS Zen Garden. It’s a site that shows the amazing things that can be done using only one HTML page. That’s it - the whole site. But what really drives the point home is that designers can submit different designs for this one HTML page and it simply swaps out a style sheet (CSS) thus delivering a totally different design, but leaving the content intact. Just click on the different links on the site and you’re seeing the same web page, but with a completely different look & feel. Amazing stuff.
And the benefits…
So again, why do you care? Well when your site is to standards it means that you can now have a return on investment. A standards-compliant web site is much faster to build and maintain, and any changes that you want to make down the road are much faster and less costly to implement.
Now instead of your editors using their CMS tool to ruin the look of your website, they now have control only over the content of the site and can stick to doing what they do best - writing. If they want to write a heading, the HTML stays as a heading and the CSS makes the heading look the way the designer intended, not the writer.
You can now respond to your customers and reach the widest audience possible. Remember the analogy of the shop? Sites that are standards-compliant can easily be made to render well on different browsers and mobile devices, and ensure that users can access your content, no matter what their browsing preference or disability. This also means that you will be living up to your legal obligation - allowing your site to be accessible to the visually impaired.
Standards-compliant websites are faster to render, thus users with slow connections are less likey to leave the site because of waiting too long for large graphics to download. Also because the content is left intact, search enginges pick up the words on your site more easily and therefore your ranking on search engines will increase.
Best of all you are future-proofing your site. As newer browsers come out, most if not all of them are embracing web standards, and so as time goes on, your website will be consistenly rendered on all the modern browsers.
Not too shabby eh? It was a long read, but if you learned something about web standards and the benefits of them, then it was worth it. Unfortunately while more and more in the web design field are embracing these standards, many traditional agencies still don’t know or don’t care about them. You shouldn’t be paying for a website that doesn’t comply with web standards nor should your customers be using it. Embrace the future of web design and feel the benefits that will come to your business.