Thursday, May 13, 2004

Reasons for Standards Based Design/Development

Hammered out by the members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standards bodies and supported in current browsers developed by Netscape, Microsoft, Opera, and other companies, technologies like CSS, XHTML, ECMAScript, and the W3C DOM enable designers to do the following:

Attain more precise control over layout, placement, and typography in graphical desktop browsers while allowing users to modify the presentation to suit their needs.
Develop sophisticated behaviors that work across multiple browsers and platforms.
Comply with accessibility laws and guidelines without sacrificing beauty, performance, or sophistication.
Redesign in hours instead of days or weeks, reducing the costs and eliminating grunt work.
Support multiple browsers without the hassle and expense of creating separate versions, and often with little or no code forking.
Support nontraditional devices, from wireless gadgets and web-enabled cell phones fancied by teens and executives to Braille readers and screen readers used by those with disabilities – again without the hassle and expense of creating separate versions.
Deliver sophisticated printed versions of any web page, often without creating separate “printer-friendly” page versions or relying on expensive proprietary publishing systems to create such versions.
Separate style from structure and behavior, delivering creative layouts backed by rigorous document structure and facilitating the repurposing of web documents in advanced publishing workflows.
Transition from HTML, the language of the web’s past, to the more powerful XML-based markup of its future.
Ensure that sites so designed and built will work correctly in today’s standards-compliant browsers and perform acceptably in old browsers (even if they don’t render pixel-for-pixel the same way in old browsers as they do in newer ones).
Ensure that sites so designed will continue to work in tomorrow’s browsers and devices, including devices not yet built or even imagined.

This is the promise of forward compatibility.

Excerpt taken from “Designing Web Standards” by Jeffery Zeldman

# posted by HolavaGuy @ 5/13/2004 11:29:00 AM