In recent years, there has been a revolution taking place behind the scenes of your favorite web pages – the rise of CSS and standards-based web development over the formerly popular table-based layout method. From the front-end, the average site visitor may never know (or care) which type of layout is used. But on the back-end there’s a big difference, and if you’re still using table-based layouts, your website has some serious disadvantages.
For years, many web designers relied on tables for producing pixel-perfect layouts. Table-based layouts can provide consistent and reliable page designs across many browsers and platforms. The problem is that tables weren’t invented with web design in mind; they were designed for tabular data. Table-based layouts are code-heavy, which can make them slow to load – and for heavily-trafficked sites (think Amazon, etc.) it makes them big bandwidth hogs. (So if your table-based pages load quickly and you don’t get enough site visitors to tip the bandwidth scales, you might be saying “so what.” But there’s more…) For many, the biggest problem with table-based design is that it doesn’t separate layout from content. Your content is buried in code, behind the scenes. This is a major disadvantage when it comes to search engine indexing – plus, practically every new electronic device, from your TV to your toothbrush, is becoming web-capable – and while you have no problem reading your web content in tables, all those non-human, web-capable devices are having a hard time figuring out what’s what.
The alternative is standards-based design, produced with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS allows you to separate layout from content, which means that more browsers, more search engines, and more of these other non-human devices have a much easier time finding and delivering your content. CSS is clearly the best forward-looking design practice.
The one problem with CSS had been the “standards” part of “standards-based design.” The standards themselves were changing faster than browsers could keep up with, making things very…non-standard. Worse yet are the different ways that the standards have been accepted and handled by different browsers. Widely-used browsers (most notably Internet Explorer) were slow to adopt the standards, so your final CSS page display could be wildly inconsistent from browser to browser – even from browser version to browser version. IE6 has been widely despised as the biggest offender; but improvements in IE7 and IE8 have now put most browsers (roughly) on the same page, and this concern has mostly been put to rest.
We hope that this introduction has given you a good foundation on the topic and encourage you to contact us with your questions about web standards, or about how these issues might affect your own web site. We’ll do everything we can to help.
Steve Lovisa
President
Silverline Creative
Tags: CSS, Standards-Based Web Design, Web Design