A Word on Web Standards // Part One - Overview and History
19.06.2008
Whilst any web developer worth his or her salt knows what Web standards are and how to implement them, here at VGroup we see many clients who have never even heard of them, or have no idea about what they may mean to them, their website and ultimately their business. We often get asked to clarify what we mean by ‘Web standards’ when we are pitching or presenting a website proposal, so we have put together a two-part mini-series to give a quick overview of the topic.
In a nutshell, Web standards describe a set of specifications and ‘best practices’ for constructing websites that - if followed - will mean the resulting website is faster loading, more easily indexed by search engines, more compatible with future technologies, easier and quicker to maintain, and more accessible to people with disabilities.
The second part of this mini-series will deal in detail with the advantages of Web standards for website owners and visitors, with this part providing a bit of background information and history on why web standards were created in the first place.
A quick overview of website construction.
Before getting deep under the skin of Web standards, let’s quickly cover the basics of how websites are constructed.
Websites are written in code, using a variety of ‘languages’ which each serve different functions and provide the three different ‘layers’ of your website – content, presentation and behaviour.
Perhaps the most important of these languages is one called HTML, which gives the content of your website its basic structure. On top of that, another language called CSS is used for the presentation layer, to style your website and make it look nice. Finally there is JavaScript, which adds a layer of interactivity and effects (’behaviour’) onto your website. All these languages need to work nicely together, and are most easily managed if they are kept as separate as possible from each other, rather than all tangled up like a ball of string.
To link this all together there are the browsers that you use to browse the internet (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari etc), which are applications that read the code and use it to display the website accordingly.
In the beginning there was…
In the early days of the Internet, before the advent of Web standards, there was no agreed standard on the best way to code web pages. There was also the so-called ‘Browser Wars’ going on, which was basically a rush by all the major browser manufacturers to implement new features in order to gain market share. The wildly differing browser implementations resulted in it being very difficult indeed to make websites that looked the same in one browser as they did in another. And the slapdash practices of the early web developers compounded the problem by writing hopelessly convoluted code, with the three layers (content, presentation and behaviour) intermixed in a fashion that made the code very difficult to maintain.
Imagine a world without standards.
The result of this mess of code and browser-specific features was that websites were difficult and expensive to maintain, took a long time to download (because of all the code), were difficult to read by search engines and were almost totally inaccessible to people with disabilities who were attempting to use ’screen readers’ and different navigation tools to access the site.
If you were to translate this situation to the real world, it was a bit like if there was no standardization on the shape of the electric plugs in houses – things would not fit together properly and you would spend a lot of time and money changing plugs to get all your appliances to work for your setup. Then if you moved house, you might have to change all the plugs again if the sockets used a different system. Thankfully we have an accepted, established set of standards in this area, so anyone can buy a plug and be sure it fits in their socket, and can open up a plug and be confident that the internals will be very similar to another one, making maintenance easy.
Along comes some sanity.
Fortunately, many web developers were aware of the problems that they had helped create, and a number of them got to work advocating a comprehensive set of standards that would bring great benefit to web developers, their clients, and the Internet in general.
Detailed specifications for the implementation of the languages discussed above already existed, created by the W3C (the Internet technology ‘overseer’) - however the problem was that neither browser makers nor the majority of web developers followed them. So the Web standards movement was centered on getting both these parties to better embrace the specifications, as well as to follow a looser code of ‘best practices’ that were slowly being developed. These best practices were based around ensuring maintainability and ease of indexing by search engines, and also highlighted the importance of making web content accessible to users with disabilities.
So where we are now?
Since this movement started, widespread adoption of web standards has taken place, making it much easier for web developers to create cross browser, future-proof websites with all the advantages mentioned above and described in detail in the second part of this series.
Sadly, there is still a lot of work to be done – for example Microsoft’s web browser, Internet Explorer (IE - which comes bundled with copies of Windows) is still far behind in it’s support for Web standards. This means that it takes considerably longer to ‘fix’ code for this browser – valid code that displays correctly in other browsers will often appear ‘broken’ in IE, when really it is the browser itself that has the problems!
There are also some web developers who have not yet got to grips with standards-based development – stay away from them! There is really no excuse not to be using modern, standards-based web development techniques these days.
If you want to know more about exactly what Web standards mean to you, your company and your visitors, check out the second part of this article – The benefits of Web standards.
Tags: accessibility, web design, web development, web standards