Web Standards
Originally written sometime in early 2005, this short rant will likely never be completely redundant as there are always going to be websites that, for one reason or another, insist that the customer isn’t right.
Without harking back too much to the bad old days of the nineties, when sites were "best viewed in Internet Explorer with a resolution of 800×600", this website has been designed to comply with the open standards as set out by the W3C, the official standards body of the web. In theory, any recent browser should be more than capable of displaying these pages as nature intended, and they should still degrade gracefully on older browsers.
In practice, of course, the real world isn’t as simple as that; some browsers pay only lip-service to those standards, and no browser completely supports all the standards all of the time, even though the more important standards have been around for some years now. In addition, you can never overestimate the inertia of an existing install base – not all machines can run the newer software, or the IT department will be upgrading them "real soon now", or the end user isn’t aware or doesn’t care that there’s better browsers out there. And that’s just on desktop machines, nevermind mobile devices or home convergence units.
Why Use Them?
Those latter cases – looking at your websites through an iPhone or similar mobile device, or sitting on your couch in front of a big TV browsing via a games console – are one of the main reasons why standards are so important. For the vast majority of websites, you don’t know for sure what your audience will use to view your website, and you certainly don’t know what they’re going to be using a year or two from now. If you start developing for one specific browser, or even for one particular screen (and text) size, then you’re raising a big middle finger to potential customers who didn’t fit in the niche you expected.
It’s not the job of the developer to dictate what someone should use to access their website; it never really was, but we didn’t know any better a decade ago. The web isn’t a novel experience for users any more and they are a lot more resistant to finding out that their setup doesn’t work with your website – unless you have no online competition, then they will just go somewhere else and not come back. If your website is standards compliant, then they will be able to use it. It may not look the same to them as it did to the designer with the big screen, high resolution, fancy computer but the customer will still be able to use your site.
(There are other benefits to standards as well, mostly to do with the ease of development, maintenance and interoperability. Plus, of course, when it’s easier to develop and maintain something, it’s normally cheaper.)
What’s The Answer?
How closely you adhere to the standards really depends on who your target audience is and how much time you want to spend catering to the widest possible audience. To a certain extent, it also depends on accepting that the users will not (and should not) have an identical experience in using your site, or else you’ll find yourself ignoring standards and usability guidelines vainly trying to make things look the same on everything under the sun.
There is an small caveat to that statement – if you’re developing for an intranet, or other closed audience site, then you should know what browsers are in use (and possibly even what they’re likely to be replaced with) and how the site will be accessed. This gives you a certain freedom to embrace the standards that are supported and to ignore the inconvenient ones, but don’t go overboard.
Normal internet sites don’t have that luxury at all; it may be quicker to develop for one version of one browser on one platform, but you’re not doing yourself any favours in the long run. If you have any interest in ensuring that the next wave of handheld devices can use your site, or in not excluding any potential customers from this generation of browsers, then there is no real choice other than coding to the standards first. If you have the time, and the inclination, then you can add the kludges that bring the nicer features of the standards to a few of the other browsers that don’t support them properly.
Put simply, write compliant code now and you won’t have to rewrite it later. The CSS Zen Garden is a great example of how this can work – you can change the whole look and feel of that site without a single bit of the content having to be rewritten.
Supporting Browsers
Whilst I hold it on faith that standards will win out in the long run, there are browsers that currently support the range of standards better than others. I’m not that much of a hypocrite to say use these or else, but there’s no way I’m writing a page about web standards compliance and not mentioning them. The following browsers are all free and all offer a better browsing experience than you may be used to:
Tagged with: standards
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Articles Articles on the Internet and other aspects of technology by drakard.com Web Standards A old look at web standards and why using them is a good idea...