Sep
19
2004
I've recently had a few discussions with some friends about designing using web standards. The main argument that comes up from them is that if the page looks okay in the browser that most people use, that should be good enough. Who cares if those that choose not to use IE don't see the site correctly? Designers should cater to the majority, and not the minority. All that matters is the final presentation of the page, and nothing else.
They couldn't be more wrong.
I used to think the same way until I educated myself. Every site I did used tables for layouts. I figured that if the page looked okay in IE, it was acceptable for the world. The problem with this thinking is that many people do not use IE, they may be using Netscape or another variant of Mozilla. They might be looking at the site using a screen reader or their cell phone. You see, IE has a very loose interpretation of HTML. It sometimes renders things the way it thinks you want it to look, not actually what you want. It has many bugs that require hacks to overcome. So you might be thinking, "why develop using standards when the majority of users use IE and it requires special markup to overcome its problems? Why not just develop for IE and be done with it?" The main reason: the web should be accessible to everyone, not just those that use a broken browser.
Developing using tables for layout or developing for IE limits one to what the markup will support. It also means increased development time, because changes or tweaks to the site usually require looking through nested tables for that one column or row that is giving you a hard time. Tables also cause a problem when more than one developer is maintaining a site. There is nothing to tell either developer what the markup means. <table><tr><td></td></tr></table> does not effectively explain what that table is used for. When using semantically correct markup such as <div id="footer"></div>, it natively explains what that section of the documents code is for. Furthermore, content becomes part of the layout, which is exactly what one should attempt to avoid.
There is also the issue of bandwidth. A company or individual may not be actually paying for bandwidth since there are some hosting plans that include unlimited bandwidth, but if you are selling a product or service and your site takes forever to load, you will surely be missing out on a sale. People will get sick of waiting and leave. Believe it or not, there are users out there that still use dialup, and a page that is 25 KB is not inviting to them. Remember the days when your online time was measured in hours spent online? How much of your money and time was wasted waiting for slow sites to load?
A post on stopdesign.com reports that Microsoft could save 924 GB of bandwidth a day if they followed standards. That is a lot of money.
Now, I am not an expert when it comes to CSS and (X)HTML, but I know enough to stay away from tables for layouts. If only the rest of the web would follow suit, Microsoft would have no choice but to fix their browser to comply with standards of the WC3, an organisation they are actually a part of. There is no valid reason whatsoever to use tables.
None.
Anyway, soon this site will be fully accessible. I'm working on it.