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natecentral — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:08:58 +0000

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This thing called “Web Standards”

natecentral — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 11:30:57 +0000

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past couple of years you have heard of “Web Standards” in some form or another. “This browser is standards compliant” or “Learning to design sites using standards,” but what exactly does the phrase “Web Standards” mean? Up until recently I haven’t been completly sure what it meant, sure I though it had to do with CSS in some way, tableless design, but I didn’t really have a concrete understanding.

I was browsing a local Chapters and came across a book by Jeffry Zeldman titled: “Designing with Web Standards, second edition.” I was in the process of developing a new website for a client and thought that I should maybe hop on the web standards bandwagon or be shuned by the web community. Within the first few pages I found that this bandwagon that I was wanting to join was pretty small due to the fact that “99.9% of websites are obsolete.” This took me by surprise. I also learned a few other interesting facts about web standards as I read on.

Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh was the first browser released that supported web standards. I don’t know about you but when I think about Internet Explorer, IE 6 and earlier anyway, I think more standards incompliance than vise-versa, so why is it this way if an early version of this dominant browser was the first to be standards compliant? It turns out, as it is with Microsoft Office products, that they have seperate development teams for Macintosh and Windows software. The reason why IE5 for Mac was this way was due to the fact that the lead designer was a big promoter of standards. It led the way for Firefox, Safari, Opera and many other browsers to strive to be standards compliant, whatever that means.

Enough with my rambling about things you may not even care about, what is this thing called standards and why should we know it? It turns out that using standards is crazy powerful and allows your site to be viewed, more like your information conveyed, accurately across all browers platforms, pda’s, cellphones and even screen readers when done right. It turns out that this is accomplished by seperating content from design and this is done through XHTML, the standards compliant version of HTML, and the well known CSS for positioning that content in the new Web 2.0 way, as well as using something called ECMA script, or a standards compliant version of javascript for scripting those fancy interactions.

From what I can tell, the method of developing a site for standards compliance, besides the syntax gudelines, is to create your content, enclosing it with divs, spans, ids, and class definitions, which sort of forms an xml-type structure. Interaction can be added using PHP, javascript, etc using the ids you created, this step can be integrated with the first. This content can then be structures accordingly by developing a CSS file that takes those divs, spans, etc. and adds formatting like position, color, backgrounds and/or graphics. What you get is a page that will render as you would assume in modern browsers as well as future browsers and will convert accordingly when viewed on other devices and legacy browsers. This sounds too good to be true, and as far as I know, it might be, but my experience so far has been that this stuff actually does work and results in less headaches for me when it comes to cross-browser compliance.

Over the next months I will be developing more and more with standards and will continue to add to this post.

My WebDev Life

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This thing called “Web Standards”