The benefits of standards-based code

Written September 19. 2003, at 10:00 GMT.

Jeffrey Veen: The Business Value of Web Standards. An excellent article about the benefits of clean, tableless HTML code and CSS layout techniques in website development. Jeffrey's five key points are:

1. Increased development speed
2. Simplified maintenance (reduced cost of ownership)
3. Increased accessibility for alternative browser technologies
4. Reduced bandwidth costs (reduced cost of ownership)
5. Faster page loads

I think that counting "increased development speed" is a little iffy. First of all customers already want things done yesterday, so if you give them this argument it will only mean they'll push the deadline even further. Secondly making tableless CSS-based designs work cross-browser can be a very time-consuming task.

Then there are two things that seem to be missing from Jeffrey's article:

• Increased code reusability. By applying different CSS stylesheets you're able to re-use much of your HTML rendering code for new sites/designs. (+development speed, +lower cost of ownership)
• Improved search engine visibility. Search engines (such as Google) have an easier time dealing with your pages if the HTML code is lean, mean, and semantically meaningful.

That's all.

Also important: Mark Pilgrim on how semantics, code-validation, accessibility, XHTML and CSS all intercorrelate: Won’t somebody please think of the gerbils?

More like this: English Entries, Accessibility, HTML/CSS, Hönnun.