About Web Standards
If you are thinking of obtaining a web presence on the internet for your product or service and is new to the subject it might be beneficial to get some feeling of what's going on behind the scenes with this, I hope, pretty easily digestible technical aspects of web building. It will also explain why I use the methods of web building that go into websites that I build.
The construction of websites for many years, were produced using a language called HTML 4, which combined the content and text with all the coding which made up the construction of the page.
The governing body that oversees web standards the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) devised a coding (and which is continuously updated and improved) called XHTML/CSS which consisted of separating the structure of the page from the text content. This streamlined the whole operation resulting in less coding. Another big advantage being that if any major alterations had to be made the CSS file only, yes just one file, which contains the structure code of the page, needed to be changed which then changes all the pages for the whole site. HTML 4 works well enough but is (I think) cumbersome and any alterations or maintenance can be difficult. Like all legacy options some people like using it but it's not future guaranteed like XHTML/CSS is. So it is, at the moment, intended to run as a choice for developers as to which he or she can use.
Another advantage is less bandwidth which means less and faster transmitted (also quicker browser loading time**) data is being up and downloaded from the Server and along with it less cost. After many years browsers like Firefox, Opera, Google's Chrome, Safari, and now (well, all most!) at long last with Internet Explorer 8 has caught up with W3C standards. Also a recent bonus from Google is that they have updated their search so that sites that are downloading slowly are now regarded as giving the user a poor experience so the site owner could be noticing a decrease in the ranking position of his website. Yet another benefit of XHTML/CSS. As a footnote here W3C is updating to HTML 5 which is intended to conbine HTML and XHTML but its still in the experimental stages and it will be a while before all Browsers will fully support it.
Still yet another advantage in improved search engine handling of sites with XHTML/CSS coding is the reduction of the ratio of content to web structure code on a Web page which makes the message of the page clearer to search engines and you are showing them the part of your page that is most important and will, in turn, help with with your sites ranking.
**Going a tad (more) technical here but its worth mentioning. The reason for the faster rendering of the page by the browser is once the CSS file has been downloaded, its held by the browser in the your PC's memory and any subsequent pages that are called only the XHTML file (which contains the content) is downloaded....Cool!
