Web Standards
Glass Onion and Web Standards
Glass Onion's approach to website development is one that embraces web standards for the production of web documents.
What are Web Standards?
Web Standards are a set of recommendations as set out by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) for producing valid and accessible web pages.
The cornerstones of Web Standards are:
- Valid code - HTML and CSS documents are used correctly and validate against the W3C specifications. The W3C XHTML and CSS badges you see on some sites, including this one, mean the site is built with valid code. Clicking on the badge will run the page through the W3C validator and tell you whether the page is valid or not.
- Semantically correct code - HTML tags are used to convey the structural meaning of the content they relate to. For example, the table tag is used only for tabular data, heading tags (h1, h2, etc) are used to indicate that a piece of content is a heading. This also means not having meaningless tags littered throughout the code and not using tags for their presentation, but instead, for their structural meaning.
- Accessibility - accessible documents are usable by the widest possible audiences, including users with visual impairments, cognitive disabilities, users of assistive devices such as screen readers as well as users of different devices such as PDAs, mobile phones, etc.
- Separation of content from presentation - HTML documents contain the content of a page, whilst all the presentational instructions are included in a separate CSS file.
What does this mean for our clients?
There are many real benefits in developing web pages in accordance with web standards. Some of the main benefits are:
- Reduced page weight and bandwidth costs - separating presentational instructions into CSS files keeps HTML files lean and clean. Users only download one or two CSS files for a site and don't continually download extra presentational data in every HTML document that is downloaded as they navigate through a site. This can reduce a site's download times by a third to a half or even more. For sites with high traffic volume this can be a saving of thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs. Faster loading pages also makes users happier especially those using dial-up connections.
- Reduced long-term development times - keeping presentation in a CSS file separate from content means a change in colour, type or layout can be applied to one file and instantly rolled out across a whole site.
- Websites that don't discriminate - well formed and accessible web pages mean that all audiences are able to view and use them. Websites that are inaccessible to some audiences have resulted in several high-profile legal actions against their owners for discrimination. See SOCOG sued for $20K over Sydney Olympics site, and more recently, Priceline.com and Ramada.com fined $40K and $37.5K respectively for examples.
- Web pages that reach more people - there are obvious benefits from a well crafted and accessible site. Smart businesses use their websites to communicate to the widest possible audience twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
