Title: Benifits of web standards

Benefits of complying the web standards

1. Your site will render properly on all platforms, web browsers, PDA's, mobile phones and any device made in the future.
2. Your site will load more than twice as fast similar non-compliant sites and will save more than half of your web site bandwidth.
3. Better search engine rankings.
4. Easier to modify.
5. Improves accessibility (essential for Government clients)

What are the standards

To explain web standards we have to mention first that web design isn't just designing a beautiful interface but behind this interface is a structural markup like HTML, XHTML, presentational language like CSS and DOM based scripts like ECMA script.

Of course there are a lot of standards & guidelines stated by the W3C We can mention 3 of the basic standards every web site should follow:

1. Every web page should contain a Doctype which specifies it's type for example HTML 4.01 transitional, XHTML 1.0 strict.
2. Markup, Presentation & Behavior should be separated from each others Markup controlled by HTML, XHTML or XML, Presentation controlled only by CSS and Behavior controlled by DOM and DOM based scripts like ECMA script, to understand what I mean more see this page without it's CSS file.
3. Markup which is controlled by HTML or XHTML is for structure only not for presentation, presentation is controlled only by CSS there shouldn't be any presentational code in a markup like <b> or <i> or using tables for lay-outing, tables should only be used for tabular data like data table or calendar. Every tag should be used for what it is made for only.

To make sure if your code is standards compliant or not, use the W3C Markup validator and the W3C CSS validator. To understand more what I mean check this page validity by clicking the XHTML 1.0 and the CSS links.

Beauty of CSS.

So does that mean we will have a boring empty interface ?

Not at all as you can see in this site CSS can make beautiful interface designs with all the benefits that we mentioned here, in fact any design can be redesigned with CSS to be standards compliant.

Speaking of CSS beauty we must mention the CSS zen garden project that proves to every body how beautiful is pure CSS layouts. It is one XHTML page and this same page can be changed by only pointing to other CSS file there is over 600 CSS files submitted from designers all over the world. Switch designs from the right panel and be inspired.

Web standards conquer the world.

A lot of sites make the switch to standards. here is a list of some of the well known switchers :

• msn
• Download.com
• BusinessWeek Online
• macromedia by the help of Eric Meyer
• abc news
• Wired news by Douglas Bowman
• The Library of Congress
• AOL
• Sprint
• ESPN by Mike Davidson
• HSBC
• TNT
• Cingular
• Chevrolet
• Adaptive path by Douglas Bowman
• FAST COMPANY by Dan Cederholm
• Inc. by Dan Cederholm
• Blogger By Douglas Bowman
• Lego
• Capgemini by Jeffrey Zeldman & Douglas Bowman

More redesigners on Eric's redesign watch.

Download Web standards overview presentation PDF or view it online for more details.