Software Development
Website Design Standards
 It is hard to believe that the World
Wide Web is only 20 years old. It has developed at a helter-skelter pace, and has
become a dominant technology in a short space of time.
The evolution of the technology has had its dead-ends and wrong turns, as competing
interests tried to dominate and push their own interests. The software industry
had to adopt some common ground and web standards became a necessity.
The World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the
original architect of the World Wide Web. The W3C, an international consortium of
companies involved with the Internet and the World Wide Web, was created to ensure
compatibility in the adoption of standards. The Web interoperability standards and
guidelines include HTML, XHTML and CSS.
Compliant web design ensures that:
- The Website is accessible from all web browsers
- The Website is accessible from devices like mobile phones
- Each web page is search engine friendly
- Each web page is consistently presented
Stylesheets
Web Stylesheets allow the separation of presentation (the visual layout or style)
from content (the text) in designing a web page. This design approach supersedes
the original concept of HTML, where a page's mark-up defined both style and content.
The style is defined in the HTML or in an external Stylesheet file using the language
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is used to describe the presentation (colours,
fonts, borders, margins, etc) of a document in the HTML mark-up. CSS is the recommended
way to add style to Website pages.
The Benefits of CSS
The separation of style and content has many benefits.
Speed
The initial page load time includes the time to download the HTML and the Stylesheet.
Thereafter the Stylesheet file will be in the browser's cache, and the reduced size
of each page will result in load times that are quicker than pages without a Stylesheet.
Maintainability
Having the presentation style in a file significantly reduces maintenance time.
It also reduces the chance of error and improves consistency. A change (font, colour,
margin etc) to the CSS file need only be made in one place, to affect all the pages
in a Website. The alternative approach of using CSS embedded in each individual
page, is time consuming and error-prone. It should only be used for presentation
exceptions.
A different Stylesheet should be used to control printed pages. This will allow
the use of a different font, font size or font colour for the printed page. It can
also be used to exclude different sections (like the menu or a footer) from the
printed page.
Consistency
Sites that use Stylesheets with either XHTML or HTML are easier to modify so that
they appear similar in different browsers. Headings, images, paragraphs and lists
all receive consistently applied styles from the external Stylesheet.
The Disadvantages of CSS
There are issues when separating content and style:
- Support for the older Browsers is difficult. The esoteric "Quirks Mode" is needed
to overcome rendering bugs in older Browsers, like IE6. And IE6 still malingers
on and on, with 20% of market share. Microsoft will be supporting IE6 until 2014.
- There is a "Transitional" and a "Strict" adherence to the HTML and XHTML standards.
The Strict standard goes overboard when enforcing the separation of structure and
presentation. It does not allow tags such as "center" and "font" which make for
a neater, simpler mark-up.
- There has been a condemnation of the usage of Tables by the CSS evangelists. Web
page layouts call for tabular presentation of pages, such as side bars for menu
navigation and header bars. Tables (although somewhat inefficient) need to be used
in these cases – the alternative is to have complex, esoteric and error-prone
CSS.
- CSS 2.1 allows only 17 named colours (black, silver, gray, navy, blue, aqua, teal,
purple, fuchsia, white, lime, green, maroon, red, orange, yellow and olive). The
rest have to be replaced by cryptic hexadecimal numbers (CSS 3.0 will define 147
named colours).
- Centring can be complex using CSS Strict, and is still useful with tables. Why,
oh why, did they condemn this feature?
Where are we now?
The standards are in a state of flux. It is all very well to agree to have standards,
but how to get the interested software parties to agree on what they should be?
The W3C stopped developing HTML version 4.01 in 2009 and XHTML 2 in 2009. HTML 5
(taken over by the W3C from WHATWG, which was formed due to the slowness of W3C)
is now the future. HTML 5 and CSS 3.0 are slowly (very slowly) reaching finalisation.
Most Website designers see the value of using CSS. But there is little benefit in
converting from the W3C Transitional to the Strict standard. Third-party software
suppliers seldom conform, Microsoft's ASP.Net 2008 does not conform and some search
engine companies do not conform to the latest W3C standards.
The worst aspect of the W3C Website standards (besides taking forever) is that they
are arcane. We definitely need standards, but uncomplicated practical functionality,
that does not require years of study to fathom the intricacies.
And the Future?
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) is faster and will support CSS3. It has rounded corners,
a new JavaScript engine, and support for HTML5. No release date has been announced,
but IE9 could be available early in 2011.
IE9 has an improved scoring in the Acid3 test (a check on a browser's adherence
to web standards) from 20/100 to 55/100 so far. It also has a feature that will
test the compliance of a website with IE9.
IE9 will only be supported on Vista and Windows 7. Presumably there will be a compatibility
option for the large number of Windows XP users. By then, hopefully, support will
not be needed for the odd remaining IE6 users.
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