Standardize

The term “web standards” gets thrown around a lot these days. A lot of developers are hopping on the standards bandwagon and developing their clients’ web sites using web standards. Most of the time, when they’re talking about using web standards, they actually mean that they develop web sites in XHTML (either transitional or strict) and CSS. But the funny thing is that people developing pages using HTML 1.0 would still be accurate in saying that they use web standards. The key thing is that the page validates using the W3C’s valid markup tool.

Let’s start from the very beginning (a very good place to start)

Pages are delivered to the web browser in either HTML or XHTML. While they may be coded in something more complex on the server (like PHP, Ruby on Rails or .NET), what gets handed to your browser is always a hypertext document (or in some rare cases an XML document — but that’s definitely the exception to the rule).

It really doesn’t matter if it’s HTML or XHTML. Both standards are still active and being developed (HTML is working toward version 5, XHTML toward version 2). Most “web standards” people will argue for XHTML because it’s a little more anal-retentive, and in general, people using XHTML are forced to produce well-formed markup. That all depends on the developer though. It’s just as easy to write poor XHTML filled with superfluous classes and IDs as it is to write HTML documents with multiple nested font tags — it just shows a lack of attention on the developer’s part.

There seems to be a bit of confusion out there about where CSS fits in to the picture though. Some folks seem to think that XHTML and CSS are tied together, but that’s simply not true. A web site can be developed using HTML and CSS. The concept of separation from content can still exist, even if the page is done in HTML.

What you should shoot for

If you’re having anything developed for the web, make it a stipulation of your contract, that at delivery, all pages of your web site (or app) must validate. There is simply no reason why they shouldn’t. Insist that, as much as possible, presentation be separated from content. This means that your developer should be using CSS. It will just make things easier down the road. When you get your end product, open a few pages at random, and do a “View source” in your web browser. If you see a FONT tag anywhere in the page, send it back.

As far as table-based, or table-less layouts go, there are a lot of good reasons to go table-less. Table-less layouts are more accessible to folks with visual impairments, they’re more flexible in rendering on different-sized screens (including mobile devices) and as a general rule, they are smaller (in terms of amount of markup) and will thus download faster and save you bandwidth costs. People will cite ease of development/compatibility as the reason for using a table in laying out a page — this is just smoke and mirrors. The exact same layout can be achieved in any modern browser with or without tables.

Industry Interactive uses XHTML and CSS in the development of all of their projects.