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People and companies who’ve been designing and building web pages for any length of time all have horror stories about sites that required complex browser detection scripts or tools and had multiple versions for different kinds of browsers. Clients may also remember the high costs associated with maintaining multiple versions of websites. For everyone involved it was something a bit of nightmare.
Thankfully, browsers have improved and developed and while not exactly uniform in how they handle code they are all a lot more standards compliant than they used to be. What does standards-compliant mean to business or organization, why should they know about and why should they want their web projects designed to meet web standards? For most business having a standards compliant web site built will only require a little more time and effort at the design stage of the game, however the payoff down the road could tremendous. Current best practices call for websites to designed as two separate elements. The content should be kept isolated from the context. This makes editing and changing the content simple and easy for people that aren’t technically savvy. By isolating the presentation layer it allows complex and radical changes to be performed site wide in a matter of minutes as opposed to weeks and months. In the early days of web development coming up with a new design for your website required every page to be changed, a process that could takes a considerable amount of time. Now by changing a few templates the context for the entire site is changed. Separating the content and the context is the first step on the road to standards compliance.
Once the content has been separated it can be marked up with the proper language. Unless you are working with a user base that is dominated by site visitors with older, slower and outdated computers XHTML is the best choice. While browsing on a phone or other mobile device is still something of a novelty and not for everyone, it is clear that this is a trend that will be growing in the coming years. Designing in XHTML gives you the most forward looking and longest lasting choice available to you. Your website will display properly in mobile and other portable devices and will work and at the very least “fail gracefully” in older less compliant browsers.
If XHTML is so great how come all web designers aren’t using it? Well most web designers have picked up a few bad habits over the years. We picked up a few bad habits from the “old days” when things worked less smoothly and we’ve reluctant to give them up. Of course what’s makes this even worse is that designing to web standards would actually save us more time than hacking around the problem. The second most popular reason is lack of client side code compatibility. If you have a website that relies heavily on Javascript designing to standards compliant code becomes a bit of a problem and sometimes even an impossibility. Moving as much of this functionality out of the browser and into the server side code usually solves the trick and gives you a more stable program anyway. The only exception would be form validation. The last reason is lack of precision. For many print designers who have moved to the web and are looking to have absolute control the web presents a few problems. Different browsers render code differently. They are becoming more and more similar, but there are subtle difference between the two. The only way to have the same level of precision you have in a print project is to resort to images and tables. This however brings us back to the maintenance aspect of a project. Image based sites are difficult, time consuming and expensive to maintain. For most projects that amount of precision simply isn’t required.
Should every website be 100% standards compliant, and should your designers and programmers burn the midnight oil working towards that goal? In a perfect world maybe, but in the real world that’s a goal that’s seldom met. What you should strive for is compliance on almost all of your pages. All of your site templates should validate and and be compliant. However having a few pages with special functions that can’t pass validation is a reasonable goal as long as you are ultimately serving your site visitor, and not a bad HTML coder and designer.
