As the discussion for web sites based on standards seems to be
falling into the usual web based battle about why should we use standards
I thought it might be useful to sum up the reason why using standards
based web design is a good idea as well as point out where these standards
fail. Just so my bias is clear I fall firmly into the camp of using
standards based web design but I know it's limits.
Pros
1) Search engine optimization
By using web standards the text to code ratio of your web pages falls to
the point where you have more textual information on the page than
hundreds of <font> tags. This make the web spiders and crawlers index
much more of your site and gives you a much higher profile in all the
search engines.
2) Document Reuse
As mentioned web pages written in a standard based format can be reused
and converted into many different formats-whether that be Word Documents,
PDF's, or printable pages, one page can be used for all formats.
3) Accessibility
This is perhaps the most important aspect of web standards it allows for
your web document to be seen and accessed on any system /software. Those
who are blind can use a screen reader which is almost impossible using
table based layout. Those with older computer systems (e.g. most of those
outside of North America and Europe) can see the content of your site with
older browsers or a text only browser without the need for a text-only
site.
No one likes being left out even if you are not using IE, can you really
afford to alienate those using something else? Most people would not like
it if someone designed a great site and then posted a message that say
"Sorry this site designed for Mozilla - no IE allowed". However it seems
that it is okay to post a message that says "This site designed for IE -
you can't use a browser of you choice".
4) Maintenance and Money
By designing a site using web standards (i.e. CSS, XHTML, WAI, etc.) you
are creating a site that is much easier to maintain. No longer do you
have to hunt through thousands of line of javascript and nested table to
add content or fix errors. All the layout is held in an organized CSS
file and the content in the XHTML file. This was the original idea when
HTML was first released, however the browsers back in 1996 could not
handle CSS very well so people started using browser hacks and "This Site
best Viewed With..." messages.
This ease of maintenance and well coded pages leads directly to savings on
your bottom line. You can now concentrate on creating content instead of
laying it out. These smaller file sizes also lead to savings in
bandwidth. With a file size of 10k for the XHTML file (CSS files are
cached-download it once for a site and use it over and over) your
bandwidth usage will drop and save money.
5) Stability (taken directly from
http://www.webstandards.org/learn/faq/#p3 they say it better than I could)
Most web standards are generally designed with forward- and
backward-compatibility in mind - so that data using old versions of the
standards will continue to work in new browsers, and data using new
versions of the standards will "gracefully degrade" to produce an
acceptable result in older browsers.
Because a web site may go through several teams of designers during its
lifetime, it is important that those people are able to comprehend the
code and to edit it easily. Web standards offer a set of rules that every
Web developer can follow, understand, and become familiar with: When one
developer designs a site to the standards, another will be able to pick up
where the former left off.
Cons
1) Pixel Perfect
The usage of standard based layouts is still in it's infancy but it is
growing fast. You cannot get pixel perfect layouts and the same look
across all platforms. However, you don't need pixel perfect layouts, if
you want one post PDF's. The web is about the user not the manufacturer.
They decide how they want to view a page and you as a good web citizen
should accommodate that. Don't force them to use a certain technology if
they don't want to. Yes your page will not look the same from browser to
browser, but this is not the print world. We must get away from the need
and thoughts that the web is print. It is not - it is flexible and
variable, standards take this into account.
2) Hacks
Because there are many different browsers, there are many different way to
interpret CSS rules. IE does it one way (sometimes very wrong) and the
others another. This lead to hacks in CSS that take into account the
problems with the various browsers. This is something to be avoided is
possible but in practice it really cannot be done. The best method
therefore is to minimize what hacks are used and try to stick to the
standards as much as possible. Until all browsers interpret CSS rules
some hacks will have to be used.
3) Lack of Knowledge and Tools
There are lots of people out there who can throw together a table based
layout in a matter of hours without knowing how to code, using WYSIWYG
editors. In order to create well coded standard based site the designer
needs to know its limits and rules. The sites are hand coded to start (a
CMS can be used after the initial layout) and the designer needs to know
how to code. You cannot just throw together a standards based site
without knowing how to hand code.
4) Validation
It would be nice if all the sites created using web standards Validated.
Using tools such as http://validator.w3.org:8001/, and
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ you can see how well your site adheres
to the standards (but these are just tools you still need to know what
they are saying and how to fix the problems). While it would be nice to
have all your pages validate this cannot be done 100% of the time.
However, validating is at best a goal not a necessity. You can still have
a great standards based site that does not validate 100% of the time.
I hope this list has cleared up some of the confusion about Standards
Based web design. If you have any questions don't hesitate to e-mail me
or the group.
P. S. For a great example of the power of CSS/XHTML standards based design
see http://www.csszengarden.com/. The XHTML files are all the same, only
the CSS is changed to create these beautiful and usable designs.
Andrew Macdonald
New Media Officer / Agent des nouveaux médias
Canada Aviation Museum / Musée de l'aviation du Canada
Phone / Téléphone : (613) 998-5689
Fax / Télécopie : (613) 990-3655
Website: www.aviation.technomuses.ca
Email: amacdon...@technomuses.ca
"Sean Redmond" <sean.redm...@brooklynmuseum.org>
08/01/2004 10:37 PM
Please respond to mcn-l
To: mcn-l@mcn.edu
cc:
Subject: Re: Web standards and museum sites
Douglas MacKenzie said:
> At 17:10 08/01/04 -0500, Sean Redmond wrote:
>
>>dominant. Netscape used to be dominant. That changed very quickly. Now
>> IE is dominant but *that* could change very quickly.
>
> Wouldn't put my own money on it though
>
>>And "context" and "platform" doesn't mean just IE vs. Mozilla or
>> Windows vs. Mac, I mean screen vs. print <SNIP>
>
> Which really gets to the crux of it. We both probably agree that
> reusability of museum data is important, not least economically. Your
> argument seems to be that this is best achieved by freezing the output
> in a Web page standard.
No, I'm saying that if you are going to spend time and money creating web
pages you should use a format that might have a little extra life and
value that "Best viewed with IE 5.0 or greater." I wouldn't tell our
designers to stop using Quark and InDesign. What are you advocating?
Distributing Word documents?
> I would argue (to the point of jumping up and
> down until frothing at the mouth) that what is best for a desktop screen
> is not necessarily the best format for the printed page, a handheld
> device or a machine-based search tool.
That's why CSS has media types, so if you want web pages that print
cleanly you define CSS rules for print media in addition to screen media.
A machine based-search tool is going to ignore the CSS, and that's why you
want well structured markup. I'm not saying that you should send XHTML
pages of your exhibition catalogs to the printing press.
> One might also want to vary the
> output on any given device according to the audience (curator, tourist,
> research student, kindergartner etc) but all based on the same source
> data. If this is all in a database, and every form of output is
> generated from this, according to the best formatting rules for the
> particular device and audience (rather than the current flavour of Web
> coding), it is much easier to add new options and take advantage of new
> interfaces or devices.
This is another topic entirely. Of course you'd be better off with
everything in well-structured database, but that's like asking if you'd
rather have a book or a librarian. If you're exporting it for the web
you're better off exporting it as well-structured XHTML and formatting it
with CSS.
> Yes, CSSs are very useful when generating web
> pages on the fly from a database but it is the underlying structure
> which is important, not the top gloss.
I don't think I was advocating top gloss as the most important part of
developing a web site. I was saying is that if you start with a good XHTML
foundation you can get a good return on that effort in multiple media
through CSS and XSL.
> 5 years down the line, after your
> putative death of Microsoft, would you rather be managing the migration
> of your data from an Access DB to a Linux-based mySQL database or
> developing a parser to convert all the data tags in a markup language?
Again this is apples and oranges. But if I am exporting data from a
database, neither do I want have to create an export format for every
device of the month, when most would do perfectly well with HTML or XML.
> (I've done both: the first in minutes; the second in years - and that
> was just the committee meetings). The database approach also makes the
> production of multilingual websites an awful lot easier.
>
>> to have Estonians and Xhosa translations of our website. Also, your
>> Estonian and Xhosa speakers may be less likely to use Windows, and
>> therefore IE.
>
> I did mean this as a question of priorities (and a wish to do more on
> our own websites and a wonderment that big-budget US museum websites
> seem to ignore non-English speakers) but, as you raise the point,
> http://www.eisa.ee/stats.php, with a preponderance of visitors from
> Estonian domains, shows IE usage at 87%.
So, like I was saying, they may be less likely to use IE. In this case
about 8% less likely.
> Xhosa I picked because there
> was a project to translate Mozilla and other Open Source programs into
> this and other South African languages but I haven't seen any study on
> what difference this has made, if any. The papers I have seen in e.g.
> the Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries, do show that
> the conceptual background to web use is quite different to that in the
> north.
I just hope people in developing countries don't waste their limited
resources on Microsoft licenses, so I want to create websites that don't
(even accidentally) require IE.
SR
--
Sean Redmond
Brooklyn Museum of Art
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