Why Web Standards?

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I bought a window shade yesterday. I measured the window. I went to the store. I pulled a 23-inch shade off the shelf and brought it home. It fits perfectly.

Last year, my wife and I bought a new dishwasher. We pulled the old one out and ordered a new one. When the new model arrived, it fit—perfectly.

I'm merely making a point here: that home improvement is made easier by standards. Someone like myself can walk into a store, buy a garbage disposal hose, and more than likely it'll fit just right. I can also purchase a new doorknob, and nine times out of ten it'll fit the door without any major adjustments.

Predetermined, standard measurements make life easy for people who build and maintain houses. When a new owner needs to update or maintain their home, standards make it easier to fix or improve it.

This wasn't always the case, of course. Not all houses built prior to the twentieth century utilized standards. This didn't mean that houses built without standards were bad houses—it just meant that updating, fixing, or maintaining these houses required extra work.

Oftentimes, people buy old houses and renovate them. Once the hard work in renovating a house is complete, the owner can take advantage of standard sizes and measurements to make maintaining the house easier.

This book isn't about houses. Yet the preceding analogy can be applied to the Web—that by using standards in our web pages, maintaining them becomes far easier. Fellow web designers and developers can more easily jump in and understand how pages are structured and styled.

Historically, designers and developers have relied on bloated markup to achieve the designs that still flood the Web today. Nesting tables three levels deep while using transparent GIF images for pixel-precise layouts has been the norm for years. But as the support for standards has increased in the popular browsers, the ability to combine lean, structured markup and CSS has reached a threshold where being standards-compliant doesn't have to mean boring design.

The trend is shifting, and those who become aware of the benefits of web standards now will gain a jump on the rest of the web design and development community. This is the way things will be going.

By understanding and using web standards, the following benefits are there for the taking:

• Reduced markup: Less code means faster pages. Less code also means more server capacity, which in turn means less money needed for server space and bandwidth.

• Increased separation of content and presentation: By using CSS to control a site's design, updates and redesigns become easier. Site-wide changes can be made instantly through the update of a single style sheet.

• Improved accessibility: Web standards enable us to reach the highest possible number of browsers and devices. Content can be easily read in any browser, phone, PDA, or by those using assistive software.

• Forward compatibility: By authoring pages using web standards, you are ensuring that they will still be readable in the future.

Any one of the preceding benefits would be reason enough to use web standards, and this book will show you how to shake those bad habits as well as tips and tricks for creating attractive standards-based designs.

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