How Web Standards Lower Costs & Increase Accessibility
Jun 22nd, 2007 by admin
Bryan Hantman of University of Maryland presented a session at HighEdWebDev in Rochester titled “Setting the Standards: How Web Standards Lower Costs & Increase Accessibility.” in October 2006.
Dimitri Glazko, one of the HighEdWebDev guest bloggers, summarized the presentation in the following way:
“In standards-compliant worlds, the separation of content, presentation, and behavior is definite and permanent. For each facet of development, there are standards, supported by World Wide Web consortium. The separation of concerns is the Holy Grail of Web standards-based development and it offers great benefits, like:
* Simpler development and maintenance — it is easier to understand and maintan standards-supported code
* Forward compatibility — use of standards and validation promotes compatibility with the future improvement of the standards
* Faster downloading — uses less HTML. He used the classic Eric Meyer’s example, where standardization cut the size of the code by 44%
* Better accessibility — semantic HTML makes it easer for screen readers and alternative devices to interpret content
* Better search engine rankings
So, what is semantic markup?
Simply put, it is about using HTML tags according to their meaning. For instance, using H1 tag to specify heading, not “bold and ugly.” Each tag has specific meaning, and Web standards developers care about the meaning.
This leads to clean, concise markup that reflects hierarchy of information. At the same time, standards are not ugly. CSS allows to control presentation (look and feel) to a very high degree.”
Bryan then gave the history highlights of his Web site.
* Old site used frames, used invalid, tag soup markup, feel apart across browsers.
* New site offers increased accessibility, lower bandwidth costs, semantic markup and better ratings in the search engines.
* The site renders picture-perfectly in IE6 and Gecko browsers (Netscape 6+, Firefox, Flock, etc.), and offers content-perfect (graceful degradatation) presentation for all other browsers.
* There is a separate stylesheet for printing.
Among accessibility features, the site has:
* access keys (cool!)
* tab indexing
* “skip to content” links
It’s one of the new, table-less layouts. Bryan mentioned that the use of tables is purely semantic, for data only. In addition, they’ve added captions and summaries to existing and new tables, which is another accessibility bonus.”
Bryan Hantman of University of Maryland was a special guest speaker at the HigherEdWebDev Conference last year. (October 2006).
The extremely valid points that Bryan has covered are so important for College’s and Universities. Without having to “purchase” a new product, you are able to give your site a competitive edge. Something that all of us need in the Higher Education field – a leg up!
