Along came CSS and XHTML.
Web Standards are designed to:
- Deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users.
- Ensure the long-term viability of any web document.
- Simplify code and lower the cost of production.
- Deliver sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices
- Continue to function correctly as browsers evolve, and as new devices come to market.
Things now.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is used to separate out the design of a website from the content of the website. It then allowed the HTML to be used as it was originally designed to be used which was to semantically structure the document. You would then have the HTML file to just markup and outline the content of the website document. The CSS file would format this HTML and display the content in the way it was supposed to look. Thus keeping the code clean, simple and much better structured.
How is this good for your sites visitors?
- Files will download faster (less code, no overall tables, valid code).
- The content is accessible to wider range of users (normal users, blind users, vision impaired users, dyslexic users, motor skill impaired users etc).
- The content is accessible to wider range of devices (screen readers, browsers, text based browsers, handhelds, search robots, printers, fridges etc)
- It allows users to customize site appearance (style switchers).
- Provides print friendly versions for all pages.
So what’s the benefit of Web standards based design? Well in using CSS for design and XHTML for markup things get a bit more interesting. Using this model your file size will shrink dramatically, usually by 50%. I’ve seen this many times in converting sites to conform to web standards. The load time isMUCH faster as a result of not having to process loads of table layout code, the web browser has to only load the cascading style sheet once thus speeding up the loading of the website.