Website Standards – Where are we now?

[bholus10]

It is hard to believe that the World Wide Web is only 20 years old. It has developed at a helter-skelter pace, and has become a dominant technology in a short space of time.

The evolution of the technology has had its dead-ends and wrong turns, as competing interests tried to dominate and push their own interests. The software industry had to adopt some common ground and web standards became a necessity.

The World Wide Web Consortium

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the original architect of the World Wide Web. The W3C, an international consortium of companies involved with the Internet and the

World Wide Web, was created to ensure compatibility in the adoption of standards. The Web interoperability standards and guidelines include HTML, XHTML and CSS.

Compliant web design ensures that:

* The Website is accessible from all web browsers
* The Website is accessible from devices like mobile phones
* Each web page is search engine friendly
* Each web page is consistently presented

Stylesheets

Web Stylesheets allow the separation of presentation (the visual layout or style) from content (the text) in designing a web page. This design approach supersedes the original concept of HTML, where a page's mark-up defined both style and content.

The style is defined in the HTML or in an external Stylesheet file using the language Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is used to describe the presentation (colours, fonts, borders, margins, etc) of a document in the HTML mark-up. CSS is the recommended way to add style to Website pages.

The Benefits of CSS

The separation of style and content has many benefits.

Speed
The initial page load time includes the time to download the HTML and the Stylesheet. Thereafter the Stylesheet file will be in the browser's cache, and the reduced size of each page will result in load times that are quicker than pages without a Stylesheet.

Maintainability
Having the presentation style in a file significantly reduces maintenance time. It also reduces the chance of error and improves consistency. A change (font, colour, margin etc) to the CSS file need only be made in one place, to affect all the pages in a Website.

The alternative approach of using CSS embedded in each individual page, is time consuming and error-prone. It should only be used for presentation exceptions.

A different Stylesheet should be used to control printed pages. This will allow the use of a different font, font size or font colour for the printed page. It can also be used to exclude different sections (like the menu or a footer) from the printed page.

Consistency
Sites that use Stylesheets with either XHTML or HTML are easier to modify so that they appear similar in different browsers. Headings, images, paragraphs and lists all receive consistently applied styles from the external Stylesheet.

The Disadvantages of CSS

There are issues when separating content and style:

* Support for the older Browsers is difficult. The esoteric "Quirks Mode" is needed to overcome rendering bugs in older Browsers, like IE6. And IE6 still malingers on, and on.

* There is a "Transitional" and a "Strict" adherence to the HTML and XHTML standards. The Strict standard goes overboard when enforcing the separation of structure and presentation. It does not allow tags such as "center" and "font" which are simpler in the mark-up.

* There has been a condemnation of the usage of Tables by the CSS evangelists. Web page layouts call for tabular presentation of pages, such as side bars for menu navigation and header bars. Tables (although somewhat inefficient) need to be used in these cases - the alternative is to have complex, esoteric and error-prone CSS.

* CSS 2.1 allows only 17 named colours (black, silver, gray, navy, blue, aqua, teal, purple, fuchsia, white, lime, green, maroon, red, orange, yellow and olive). The rest have to be replaced by cryptic hexadecimal numbers (CSS 3.0 will define 147 named colours).
* Centring can be complex using CSS Strict, and is still useful with tables. Why, oh why, did they condemn this feature?


Where are we now?

The standards are in a state of flux. It is all very well to agree to have standards, but how to get the interested software parties to agree on what they should be? The W3C stopped developing HTML version 4.01 in 2009 and XHTML 2 in 2009.

HTML 5 (taken over by the W3C from WHATWG, which was formed due to the slowness of W3C) is now the future - but the infighting has already started. And CSS 3.0 is going nowhere - after more than 10 years without finalisation, you shouldn’t hold your breath.

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[bholus10]

Most Website designers see the value using CSS. But there is little benefit in converting from the W3C Transitional to the Strict standard. Third-party software suppliers seldom conform, Microsoft's ASP.Net 2008 does not conform and some search engine companies do not conform to the latest W3C standards.

The worst aspect of the W3C Website standards (besides taking forever) is that they are arcane. We definitely need standards, but uncomplicated practical functionality, that does not require years of study to fathom the intricacies. Perhaps Website designers will just have to wait another decade or two.

Neville Silverman is a Microsoft software developer, based in Sydney Australia, and has been involved in Visual Basic programming, Microsoft Access programming and Website design for many years.

As an I.T. Manager, his department was regarded as a centre of excellence. He reduced the expenses of his department to .9% of income, where the industry average was 2.5%.