Designing with web standards

It’s difficult to believe, but the way most websites are coded makes them obsolete almost immediately after they’re created—that is, they won’t work in future web browsers. Madness, we hear you cry. How can that be?

The story is complicated, but to summarise: the constant struggle between open, interoperable standards and proprietary software meant that until recently, it was impossible to code web pages that worked in all browsers, without creating separate code for each browser. Chaos followed.

Enter standards

In fact, the W3C had created “recommendations” for interoperability, with names like HTML and CSS. The problem was that web browsers didn’t implement them consistently—so it was effectively impossible to write interoperable code. The Web Standards Project, a grassroots advocacy group, fought a campaign to rename these recommendations as “web standards”, and managed to persuade browser vendors to implement them properly—a monumental achievement. All modern browsers now support web standards, to varying degrees.

Separating content, presentation and behavior

The power of web standards is their ability to separate content, presentation and behavior. For content, we write semantic markup (HTML)—a document structured with headings, paragraphs and links. For presentation, we create Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which specify how such a document should be presented visually. For behavior, we use JavaScript—a programming language that customises browser behavior, for example by changing parts of the page without a full page load (Ajax).

Maintainable, interoperable, future-proof

A key benefit of designing with web standards is maintainability. Semantic markup is much easier to maintain than its predecessor, junk markup, because it only deals with meaning and structure. All the presentation is handled by the style sheets—and a set of style sheets can be shared across a large website, which makes it easy to apply a change across thousands of pages. Proper use of web standards will make your site interoperable across browsers, and visible to search engines—and your site will automatically be future proof, because it complies with published, open standards.

Accessibility

Providing web accessibility for people with disabilities is not only good business sense, it’s a legal obligation—under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 in the US, and similar legislation around the world. Proper use of web standards will get you a long way towards making your site accessible, because standards-compliant code is easier for assistive technology to understand. (There are other factors to consider too, of course—we’ll guide you through.)

Our use of web standards

Every website we design uses web standards—semantic and valid markup, style sheets for presentation, progressive enhancement for scripting and interoperability across browsers and platforms. (You can check our portfolio if you’d like some proof.) To an extent, this is no longer your concern—standards are now an essential component of professional web design, and you can safely leave them to us. (This doesn’t yet apply to all agencies, unfortunately.) But you might notice the benefits when you access your site on a mobile device, or need to change browsers or operating systems—the site should work perfectly.