The Future of the Web is Following The Rules
Here’s a piece I (quickly) wrote for NPower’s newsletter. It’s a web standards piece targeted at a non-technical audience.
The future of web design is here, and it isn’t flashy animations, or streaming video, or whiz bang bells and whistles. The future of web design is Following The Rules. The future is designing web sites based on industry best practices that have been codified and are called Web Standards. These standards cover HTML, stylesheets, and scripting languages—three building blocks that make up the websites we visit each day.
Web Standards, in short, are best practices for web site design. But, we all know you can get any job done without following the best practices—just look at my home-improvement projects! It might be a little harder to maintain your finished product (ever try to repaint a hole in the wall spackled with toothpaste?), but it can be done. Maybe we’ve figured out a nonstandard way that works (pretty well) and we stick with it. A web site developed according to Web Standards may, at first look, be difficult to distinguish from one that doesn’t follow them. So why should we care?
Websites developed with Web Standards are simpler. Very smart people invented Web Standards based on lots of experience over the first 10 years of the web. They generally have good ideas on how to do things with as little effort as possible. And we all know that simple things are easier to maintain than complex things—do kids even lift the hoods of their parents’ cars anymore? There’s nothing in there simple enough for them to fix.
As the web changes and new, amazing functionality is available; the core web standard features will not go away. By using Web Standards today, you can ensure that you won’t have to rewrite web sites just to keep them functioning. This can be a great money saver down the road.
When you follow Web Standards, your site is automatically accessible to people who use screen readers or need to use large fonts. Without any extra effort, you are opening your site to a world of disabled visitors, many of whom may be your constituents.
So, Web Standards are great. How do you make sure your web site is built according to Web Standards? Use HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and the Document Object Model (DOM). Check out the New York Public Library Online Style Guide (http://www.nypl.org/styleguide/index.html). It’s a great tutorial on how to have a Web Standards friendly site. And then go through the Web Standards checklist (http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/checklist.cfm).
But simple is boring, right? That’s true, but only on the code site of the site–here’s a flashy site that follows Web Standards (http://www.espn.com). ESPN.com is definitely not boring!
If you have a website, check and see if it is Web Standards compliant. If not, next time you want to modify it, find someone to help build it who understands the value of Web Standards, and join the future of web design!
