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Using Modern Standardized Web Technologies

Written by Nicholas Vrvilo

Brigham Young University (Provo, UT)

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The internet is quickly becoming an integral part of today's business world as companies of all sizes and types see the clear benefits the World Wide Web offers in reaching their clientele. However, most companies are not familiar with the internal workings of a website and how those workings might affect its efficiency and ability to reach their audience. The W3C has created a set of "web standards" for web development, striving for an effective web accessible to everyone. There are three major areas with guidelines to focus on when creating a website: structured markup, styles, and accessibility.

Ensuring well-structured markup code is the first step toward efficiency and standards compliance. All web pages use a "markup language" to define their content. Most of the web uses HTML, but the W3C's current recommendation is XHTML, which is more lean and efficient with a stricter set of rules tailored for structure. XHTML is a subset of XML, which is quickly becoming the standard language for electronic information interchange online. This means that any application capable of interpreting XML can also easily interpret a web page written in XHTML, which makes it easier to reach audiences on diverse platforms such as cell phones, TVs, cars, and PDAs.

The second focus point for building a website is the styling aspect. Back in the early days of the web, pages were laid out using a jumble of nested data-table structures to divide the page into several different sized rectangles for the page's content. Modern browsers allow the use of CSS to position and style web content. A comparison between a sleek CSS design and the old table-based model for Microsoft's home page was presented last year at a Digital Design World session by web designer Douglas Bowman. His example redesign's code was about two-fifths the size of that of the original tabular design, and he estimated that, based off the high traffic of this page, Microsoft could save over 900GB in bandwidth per day by switching to CSS and thus reducing code bloat. Using CSS also allows for simple redesign, or even multiple style options for the same page, as is beautifully demonstrated by the CSS Zen Garden.

Finally, after structuring the content and styling it with CSS, the website's accessibility still needs perfecting. Following the W3C's WCAG specification enables viewing of a website by a much larger audience. For example, specifying a text alternative for each image communicates information to users that they might otherwise miss if an image breaks, or if images are disabled on a handheld device with limited screen space. Likewise, marking up a section of text as "emphasized" will portray significance to a blind user using a screen-reader, whereas just styling the text's color to red would not.

Use of the modern standardized web technologies should be a must for any business creating or remodeling a website. With accessibility to a wider audience and efficiency, why wouldn't it be?

Further Reading: http://www.webstandards.org/learn/