Why use web standards?

Index

Introduction

Web design is getting harder. As has been said, designing a site now means addressing “more customers, a broader audience, more diversity in terms of browsers, more accessibility for disabled users, users asking for more speed, while spending less to maintain or redesign a web site”. It’s an increased challenge from many angles.

Web standards were specifically developed to address this. They help ensure near universal access to online information as well as making for faster and cheaper web development by ending the expensive “build, break, rebuild” cycle.

What are web standards?

Web standards aim to produce a web where files can be read by anyone, regardless of what they are using to access the Internet. Although there are standards for much of the Internet, when we talk about web standards we generally mean those for HTML (and its successors) and CSS. Key is the seperation of structure from presentation. The web standards team are also concerned with the broader areas of accessibility and usability.

See Natalie Jost's Web Standards in a Nutshell (PDF, 208kb)

"It's about quality, not compliance"

The term "Web Standards" for some people, often those with a communications or design background, still has a constrictive, vaguely Orwellian feel about it. That's based on misunderstanding, as many top web designers such as Andy Rutledge will attest.

Rutledge (who admittedly isn't sure about the term itself, but we're talking about the same things) aptly calls his response "Web Standards: it’s about quality, not compliance". A List Apart's Jeffrey Zeldman also makes a strong, entertaining case for web standards.

Accessibility

Governments, including ours, are the “largest single producer, collector, consumer, and disseminator of information in the country”, most of which, along with services, is being moved onto the Internet. It’s a democratic imperative that none are excluded from this vast online resource.

Because of this, web accessibility means ensuring people with a disability - often a sight impairment or motor disorder - can reach this information and services. This is a significant part of the population. But accessibility has a wider definition and includes users whose Internet access is limited by:

older client technology including computers, operating systems and/or browsers.
slower and/or restricted internet access. This can occur for users in rural and remote parts of the country, and for those with dial-up connections.
having bars on access to some types of programs, such as javascript or flash, because or firewalls or similar.

Usability

Usability has been has been defined as “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction”. In other words, usability measures the quality of a user's experience while on your website. So it goes beyond accessibility – a site may validate correctly, but be effectively unusable. You may be able to download all the pages correctly, and still get lost at every second turn. Always check your site with in a thorough user testing programme. We're happy to offer testing and information architecture advice.

See our Usability web guide.

What’s in it for my organisation?

Web standards are often characterised as being useful only to the blind or otherwise disabled. While serving this group is an important part of the standards rationale, there are many other reasons why standards-based sites represent the future, not the least of which is the effect on your bottom line. In the commercial sector, it’s often about saving money. That's why sites like ESPN have dropped all layout tables in favour of structural markup and CSS-driven layout (and saved 2 terabytes of bandwidth a day). The same drivers apply to government.

Cut costs. Compliant sites are often cheaper to maintain, develop and run. Pages can be much lighter, reducing load costs. There are no tables or framesets to decipher down the track - older table-based sites are particularly inflexible (and expensive) to update. So your longevity increases. You also avoid the costs of producing code forking, deeply nested tables, spacer pixels and propriety hacks.
Improve your searchability. Google has been called the biggest blind user on the web, because it (and other search engines) are especially partial to indexing standards-compliant sites.
Break the “build, break, re-build” cycle. Ensure forward compatibility with new browser releases: your CSS-based site will render properly in future browsers. You can't be sure about table-based sites. As leading (standards compliant) browsers evolve, the performance of non-standards sites deteriorates. This has been called “perpetual obsolescence”.
Simplify your design requirements. Compliant sites have a better chance of working properly on all resolution and monitor size, and still maintain design integrity.
Free your site from the desktop. Device independence: make it work in handhelds, phones and other devices.
Good publicity. Producing a good-looking, high-functioning, standards-compliant site is increasingly the benchmark of good design and development.

Paraphrasing a recent blog on the subject, several parts of your organisation gain:

Web developers - maintainable code
Marketers - search engine effectiveness
Managers - cost effectiveness
Accessibility advocates - it's ethical

Building a business case for a standards-based site

Web standards is still not always an easy sell. We hope that the above outlines the basis of a solid business case for building (or rebuilding) websites that adhere to standards. There may be an initial period of increased outlay, but it’s well worth the trouble. We also highly recommend pointing your development company to this or similar pages, and building standards compliance into development contracts.

The web standards team are more than happy to provide advice in preparing a business case for making your site standards compliant. In the meantime, here are some helpful links on the subject with business and IT managers in mind.

The Business Case for Web Standards (Adaptive Path)
The Business Case for Web Standards (The Business Case for Web Standards Wiki)
The Way Forward with Web Standards (MACCAWS)
The Benefit of Accessible Design for Able-Bodied Users of the World Wide Web (Assistive Technology Research Institute)
ESPN case study (Mike Industries)
Benefits of an Accessible Website (Webcredible)
Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization: Overview (W3C)