Eric Meyer has an interesting post about how using standards-oriented designs provides a faster web site.
That’s certainly true in my experience, but what I really benefit from is the ease of maintaining and updating my site since I switched to standards-based design. In the bad old days, I relied on bloated, table-based, font-laden HTML for my site design. My finished site would look decent enough, but a few months down the road when I wanted to update it, I’d be faced with a mess of nested tags, stacked like tinkertoys and just waiting to fall apart. After I caught on to the benefits of CSS and redesigned my site (using TopStyle, of course!), maintaining my site became much less of a chore.
So. even if you have a small site and don’t think you’d really benefit from the bandwidth reduction of standards-based design, chances are you’ll still benefit overall from giving up outdated HTML and relying on CSS/XHTML.
(thanks to Jack Brewster for the link)
I found the “interesting post” link shut down FeedDemon twice (it took several minutes to get sorted out after a restart). It also killed IE.
Ditto.
Yeah, somethings up with that. I clicked on it, and FeedDemon locked up quick (sorry if this out of context to your post).
Another principal use for adhering to standards (XHTML Strict even) is that in the end, it produces a nice well-formed XML packet, that in future years to come, you can parse to extract “basic” content.
As most of said, keep your CSS classes and tags descriptive enough to outline what they do (semantics) and limit your class defintions to containers (of course you can break out of this mould, but its healthier).
I just changed the link, since it was causing IE to lockup.
I also liked what Eric had to say about faster-loading times with standards compliant sites.
One thing I noticed about all of the write-ups on the benefits of standards compliance is that not one of the articles I found really spoke to the benefits for small- and medium-sized Web sites. Almost all write-ups talked about reduced bandwidth, but this doesn’t mean much to sites that get a couple thousand visitors a month or less (many of my clients). In order to sell standards compliance to my clients, I drafted something on the benefits for all sites, particularly the smaller ones. For anyone interested, you can read the write-up at http://www.jjpg.com/what_makes_us_different.php . Hope you find this useful.
BTW: Love Topstyle. Live by it.