Presentations
Web Standards
What are the underlying concepts of web standards?
- semantically meaningful mark-up
- separating content and presentation
What are the benefits?
- interoperability
- accessibility
- cleaner code = faster downloads + bandwidth savings,
- internationalization,
- easier to maintain and redesign
Example: ELISABETH.COM -http://www.elisabeth.com/home/index.jsp
- Tables-based - non-standards version
- CSS-based layout standards version
- Comparison of Page Weights
- Comparison of Download Times
Thanks to Stephanie Troeth for her work on the Elisabeth site conversion
Myths about Web Standards
- Standards make your Web site "ugly and boring"
- Standards increase development time
- All of the visitors to my site use Microsoft Internet Explorer anyway
- It doesn't look the same on all browsers
How to Do Web Standards
- Educate yourself and your team
- Educate your clients
- Try incremental changes if you have a large site
- Validate. Validate. Validate.
WYSIWYGs and standards
- in order to create a site that takes advantage of web standards, you need to plan well and fully understand the code
- making these changes will *help* you to keep the code compliant and will *help* to keep your authors and other users creating standards compliant code
- it is not a panacea but a good and easy first step
Resources
Learning how to code to the standards
- W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
- W3 Schools
- CSS-Discuss - the mailing list is great - but the Wiki is invaluable
- Netscape DevEdge
Setting up Dreamweaver to Produce Compliant Code
Standards Advocacy
- WaSP (the Web Standards Project)
- MACCAWS (Making a Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards)
- CSS Zen Garden