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The Benefits of Web Standards
This article will introduce you to the web design practice known as "Web Standards".
We'll attempt to explain why table-based sites do more harm than good and how implementing Web Standards can hugely benefit your business by making your website more efficient, attract new users and ultimately make the web a better place!
So what's the problem with using tables?
The internet was originally intended for academics, researchers and the military. It was visually crude and not very user-friendly. When it became mainstream, designers needed a way of making websites more visually appealing and using tables seemed to be the answer. They could use tables as a grid to help them creatively lay out their text and images.
The internet has moved on a great deal since then but using tables is still one of the most dominant ways of creating visually rich pages and it is now actually hindering creating a better, more accessible and reliable Web.
The disadvantages of table-based design -
- Presentation (design) is mixed in with content
- Makes the file size of of pages unnecessarily large and slower to download
- Harder to maintain and develop websites and more time required (more expensive)
- Less accessible to disabled users and those using mobile phones & PDAs to access the Web
Why should I switch to Web Standards?
Modern browsers are much better at displaying website that use Web Standards so there is no need to use outdated tables anymore. Instead of nesting tables within tables and writing unnecessary code, we can use much simpler markup and CSS to lay out beautiful sites that are faster to load, easier to maintain, and more accessible to everybody.
The advantages to your Website being built using Web Standards -
- Will load quicker because less code is required
- Easier and cheaper to maintain
- More compatible with content management systems
- Pages will print better
- Easier to maintain visual consistency
- More responsive so easier to experiment
- Design and populate content simultaneously
- Works in older browsers
- Works with alternative devices such as mobiles and PDAs
- Makes your pages accessible to disabled and older users
- Search engine friendly getting you better search engine results
- Future-proof for upcoming browsers