Web standards, Semantic XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets…to some this all may sound like the new hype in Internet technology, but it’s not. This is the culminated technology that will give structure, accessibility and worldwide availability to our websites. Let us first go back a little bit in history to get a better understanding of things.
The Internet, WWW & HTML.
HTML was created to create and organize text and articles. To format and share these documents among many people, HTML was used to markup these documents and structure them. It was not meant for multimedia, it was not meant for the hardcore marketing and design tasks as it is today. Since the boom of the Internet and its popularity today, the web designer has been forced to sort of work around this limitation, hack together solutions and apply band-aid after band-aid in order to “Make things work”. Doing various techniques like using Tables for layout, image slicing for design, huge amounts of unnecessary spacer gifs and font tags in order to format the content people wanted to see.
Things then.
Now as you have it, many websites which do not use web standards often employ a strategy using tables for website layout. While this has worked for a long time it has its downfalls and cons. For one, usually these sites use tables to structure information, images to apply design and it boosts up the size of the website considerably.
Not only does the size remain large but the site is slower to load and the code is a complete mess and hard to maintain. A table-based layout design is not SEO, which means search engine optimized. To top it all over many browsers and different devices do not render these sites in the same fashion and often break in many. The accessibility and availability of these sites was not optimal.