Why your site should be developed with CSS and semantic markup
One thing that I have learned in over a decade developing web sites is
that the Net is continually changing, and to keep up you need to change
with it. One of the more recent developments in web design is the use of
CSS and semantic markup. CSS and semantic web design has several benefits:
clarity in code, browser and other web-enabled devices compatibility,
seperation of content and presentation, smaller burden on bandwith, and
better visibility to search engines.
Back in the day, we designed sites with tables and hacked those tables
into doing things that they were never meant to do. The table tag was
designed to display tabular data, not as a way to render the layout of a
website. Unfortunately, a better alternative did not exist, so we used
tables. This made for inefficient, slow loading sites with code that was
very hard to read and maintain. Wikipedia defines sematic markup like this:
Sematic pages: supply information for Web search engines using web
crawlers. This could be machine-readable information about the
human-readable content of the document (such as the creator, title,
description, etc., of the document) or it could be purely metadata
representing a set of facts (such as resources and services elsewhere in
the site). (Note that anything that can be identified with a Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI) can be described, so the semantic web can reason
about people, places, ideas, cats etc.)
These days, hip designers and developers use CSS extensively to create
beautiful, fully standards compliant sites. CSS-based layout allows us to
develop sites that will degrade effectively--that is that they will be
viewable on all types of devices such as PDAs, cell phones, T.V.s--and
will work correctly on devices that dont even exist yet as long as they
are standards compliant.
Most importantly, developing sites with CSS allows us to effectively
separate content and presentation. Have you ever looked at the source code
of HTML pages that were created with a table-based layout and wondered
what the heck is going on here? You see lots of opening and closing of
tables and table rows all mixed together with textual content and
graphics. With a clean, CSS-based layout you can create pages that are
easily understood by looking at the source, making them easier to
understand, maintain, and update. Look at the source of my company site
http://www.vp3media.com and then look at the source code of this site that
uses a tables based layout: http://webservices.org/. Big difference, huh?
If you have a site with high traffic, you can significantly reduce the
amount of bandwdth used by transitioning from a table-based site to a
CSS-based layout. If a visitor to your site doesnt have to load all of the
code needed to render those tables and spacer gifs, you are transmiting
less data.
CSS also offers search engine optimization benefits over tables. If you
have a tables based business site that relys on Internet traffic to turn a
profit or aquire new clients you will see real advantages by switching to
CSS. When a search engine spiders your tables-based site, they retrieve a
large amount of content that has nothing to do with you business. When
search engines spiders a clean CSS-based site, the majority of content
retrieved will be textual content that describes your business. The ratio
of content-to-code is higher with CSS-based layouts.
Weve all seen search engine descriptions that dont make any sense; thats
because search engine spiders use a top down method for retrieving
information. Whatever is topmost in your document, the search engines are
going to think is the most important part of the document, and therefore
should be used as the description. Since we seperate content and
presentation with CSS, we can put the most important information at the
top of a document no matter where it is actually displayed on the page.
Try that with tables!
I hope this article gives you an overview of why it is important to
transition from your current tables-based layout to a fully valid CSS
implementation. If you dont have a web site, but are planning on launching
one in the near future, make sure you tell your developers you want a
CSS-based implementation. If you need help moving from your current
tables-based site to a CSS-based one, please feel free to contact me at
vp3media@gmail.com or call me toll free at 1-877-320-4349 and Ill be happy
to discuss your site with you.
James Kendall has been developing websites for over a decade and has
founded and co-founded several companies concerned with web development
since 1994. Currently he runs VP3Media and focuses on one on one
interaction with select clients.
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