Web Standards Manifesto
As part of my new role will hopefully be to educate the other developers here on the benefits of using web standards, I wrote a short manifesto on why standards are the way to go for web design.
After a brief introduction and history lesson, I dived into the separation of Structure, Presentation and Behaviour, illustrated throughout with simple code examples. Headings, lists, positioning and forms were all given the once-over, and I even touched briefly on image replacement (Phark method, if you’re interested) and the float model within the dissection of CSS.
Finally, I spoke briefly about using the DOM in Javascript development, before finishing with a summary of why you should always include a DOCTYPE and Content-Type, and the benefits of XHTML over HTML.
Accessibility aside, the key benefit from a commercial point-of-view is that of speed of development and later maintenance – with only one or two CSS files to maintain instead of wading through dozens of nested tables and font tags, our team can become much more streamlined and therefore also deliver a greater ROI.
Was there anything important that I’ve missed out?
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