Branding Issues

As mentioned above, separating content from presentation is an excellent way to future-proof your intranet. Consider this situation:

You are working for a company that has a large and successful intranet consisting of several thousand standards-compliant pages and which is extensively branded with the company colors from the main logo to the color of the <H1> elements. Then let's say that your business is bought out by a company who want to change all your internal branding in the intranet; this branding is not just the color scheme but they also want the font changing from Arial to Verdana and the underlines for hyperlinks must be in purple, not the default blue.

This may seem like an extreme scenario, but it's not an unrealistic one. I know that I'd much rather spend a few hours adjusting my stylesheets and then testing to make sure all is OK rather than manually altering every instance of a font or changing an image on every page that I could have placed on a page using CSS.

Coding with proprietary elements and hacks will take just as long as coding to standards will, except that you'll end up in a situation where you'll have a site that might not work in the future. This leads to the question as to why anyone would want to use proprietary code. You're never going to be 100% certain that your company will stay with one make of browser. Internet Explorer is currently the global browser of choice, but that hasn't always been the case. If we look at the way that the Gecko rendering engine is being pushed forward maybe Netscape will become dominant again, or perhaps even Opera will suddenly take off in spectacular fashion. Who knows!