New Brand Media - The Business Case ForWeb Standards

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR WEB STANDARDS Jonathan Porter

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Agenda • Benefits of web standards – Lower your development and maintenance costs – Future-proof your sites – Reach more customers and improve the user experience

• Considerations • Conclusion

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It’s about reducing costs, future proofing, and customer acquisition and satisfaction • By using web standards as defined by the W3C, companies can reduce costs and gain many strategic advantages. These advantages are detailed in the following slides.

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Lower Costs: Much easier to manage a sitewide look and feel • Getting rid of the painful mix of content and presentation by separating them • Use Strict HTML and CSS to enforce the separation • Store presentation in a separate file, aka « Style Sheet » • It is possible to update style sheets (and change the layout on all pages) without updating the documents.

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Lower Costs: Simplified development and

deployment • Using CSS for special effects on text makes one’s web site much easier to update.

• Well-formed (valid) HTML code reduces quality assurance costs – Errors are spotted by W3C’s Validator – Rendering differences still exist, but are limited

• Asking a vendor to produce a standard-compliant web site is a way to ensure a measurable quality control on what is delivered. See http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/07/WebAgencyRequirements

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Lower Costs: Standards use less

bandwidth, load faster • Separating presentation from content using style sheets reduces the size of documents.

Therefore web pages load much faster, which translates into a better user experience.

“CSS has made it possible to transform table-based layouts into CSS-based layouts. Typically this reduces page size by 25 to 50%. “ Interview with Andy King (Author of Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization)

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Future-proof: Standardized code • Content needs to be ready for non-PC devices (phones, handhelds, etc.)

• Using valid standards-compliant markup ensures that data will still be re-usable for a long time on many devices, as specification on how to interpret the standards are well documented and here to stay.

• Coding to standards does not mean producing less compelling content.

– As a matter of fact almost anything taking advantage of proprietary extensions can be done in a standards-compliant way.

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Future proof: Extensible architecture • Using Strict HTML and CSS paves the way to XML • XHTML is an XML-compatible version of HTML • Tools and standards are becoming available for leverage in the near future: – SVG – Scalable Vectors Graphics (Animated graphics) – MathML – to manipulate Mathematical equations – XSLT to transform data in an XML-language into another.

• These XML technologies have been built around interoperability.

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Future proof: Avoids lock in to particular developers • See http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/07/WebAgency-Requirements • Most organizations have experienced difficulties in reusing code written by a former vendor or employee, because of undocumented "hacks" and specific coding practices.

• Valid standards-based code ensures that code is on par with best practices.

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More Customers: Better search engine ranking • Separating presentation from content augments the information/markup ratio. Since most search engines rely on text placed on top of the page, using standards such as CSS give such web pages a higher rank.

• Using text and CSS to do special effects such as rollovers instead of graphics also help.

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More Customers: Compatible with more browsers and platforms • Overall, 5 different rendering engines are used to surf the web in dozens of browsers on 3 platforms.

• More and more browsers, other than Internet Explorer for Windows, are used to surf the web.

– Windows : MSIE, Netscape Gecko, Opera.

– Mac: MS-Tasman (IE/Mac) , Netscape Gecko, KHTML, Opera – Linux: Netscape Gecko, KHTML, Opera

• Coding to standards (instead one or two specific browsers) is then the only practical solution.

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More Customers: Accessibility • Accessibility is a major mandate – Section 508 in the US – 2003 European year of people with disabilities

• Recent W3C standards (HTML 4.01, CSS, XHTML) have been designed with accessibility in mind, simplifying accessibility compliance.

• Your site better serves disabled people as well as those using non-PC devices, increasing a web site’s effectiveness as a broad communication tool.

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More Customers: when customers are not turned away • Using web standards permits serving a single document, whatever the browser is.

• No customers are turned away because they have a browser not used while testing your web site • Smaller web pages mean faster display, a very compelling thing for millions of users who are still connected via modems.

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Conclusion: It’s smart to invest in web standards today • Using standards today means – Reducing cost of developing and managing content – Reaching a wider audience (wider compatibility with browsers, accessibility, better ranking in search engines) – Compliance with accessibility law

• Tomorrow – Reduced lock-in to particular developers and vendors – Reduced cost of maintenance – Flexibility of presentation, including non-PC devices – A door open to XML technologies and benefits 15 www.newbrandmedia.co.uk

“To hedge one's product success and longevity bets, preserving a path to cross-platform support should be a development action item from day one.”

Eweek, “If You Don't Build It, They May Never Come”

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