Why Use Standards?

Paul W. Davis

This is a good question, particularly in a day and time when you can put your own website together in Frontpage or Dreamweaver with only a modicum of knowledge about the software and a few graphics to place on the pages. To answer that question, a little bit of background information is in order.

Back in the very early 1990's, when the web was just starting to go forward, the way browsers presented content was not great. All HTML code used to style the page was placed in the page itself, and consequently made the pages bloated, with long load times on the larger pages. This was considered first-generation for browsers, and for the code itself.

As things progressed, browsers became better but the infamous browser wars existed due to considerable variance in how each browser interpreted page coding. By this time, the two primary competitors were Netscape and Internet Explorer; each had radically different ways to present the very same code. Needless to say, this caused pages to look very different when viewed in IE versus Netscape and also in some other not so common browsers.

When the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) came into existence in 1994, it addressed the standard for how browsers interpret the code used to style and display the content of a page. In defining the standard, all those involved with the web and presentation of its content were invited to work together to determine what HTML should be, and how best to interpret its commands. Since this was an effort that began after the advent of HTML and browsers to interpret it, implementation was spotty at best.

With the passing of time, more and more browsers came into compliance with the standards set by the W3C, with one notable exception — Internet Explorer. Nevertheless, since the advent of the W3C in the nineties, there have been advances in the standard, from no Cascading Style Sheets through CSS 1, and now CSS 2.1, with the Consortium working on CSS 3. HTML has progressed through HTML 4.01, and is now XHTML 1.1. The code for styling content on a web page has come a long way since its inception, and the way browsers interpret that code has changed as well.

Before standards, a complicated page meant lots of code and a bulky page that would only display correctly in the browser it was designed for. Today's standards-compliant code can display the same page in virtually any browser, with the same styling, using less than half the code. Pages load faster, the colors are sharper and crisper, and there is less likelihood of pages hanging up the browser.

Can you still create a web page using Frontpage or Dreamweaver, and make it look good? Yes, you can. However, it will contain far more code, and be slower-loading than the same page created using hand-coding and adherence to W3C standards. Any piece of web creation software used to design a page has to be set up by placing a proper doctype in the header, and the resulting page must validate to insure standards compliance. Last of all, there are still issues between browsers, and a lot of older browsers are still being used. Using standards means that it is much easier to adjust for the differences in display properties between browsers, as the changes are made in the stylesheet instead of in the page.

The difference between a page or site designed with adherence to standards running on a current browser and a page that is simply ‘put together' is akin to running 20W-50 motor oil in a modern engine designed for 10W-30 motor oil. Yes, the engine is lubricated, but fuel economy suffers and the engine's horsepower output is not quite what it ought to be. In short, performance suffers, and in more ways than one.

So, why have your site perform like it was created 15 years ago? Insist on standards complaint web pages to insure your visitors have an enjoyable experience browsing your site. You are much more likely to have return visits from them. After all, isn’t that why your site exists?