[Web4lib] Resources? -- Web Standards and Semantic Markup

Tue May 1 20:08:45 EDT 2007

David Kane wrote:
> Hi Andrew, Tim, All,
> 
> I think that web standards can have a normative force insofar as a
> standards-compliant website whose markup reflects the semantics of the
> content will lend itself very readily (in my experience) to compliance
> with WAI and Section 508 guidelines.
> 

Yes, it that is a very compelling argument in favor paying attention to 
web standards.  In fact, it's difficult to create a highly accessible 
site with an ambivalent view of standards.

A wrote a brief piece on this subject for a workshop a couple years ago:

Accessibility benefits of "standards-based design" and "structural markup"
<http://www.4serendipity.com/accessibility/struct/>

> 
> Another possible justification for standards compliance is that the
> separation of style from the content typically creates a smaller file
> size.  Some people also say that a semantically structured document
> lends itself more readily to search indexing.  This sounds good, so you
> can say it to your boss if you like, but I am unaware of any evidence to
> support it.

This another valuable beneficial outcome of using standard markup. A 
related benefit is the ease with which standard markup is maintained. 
Marking up pages best suited to quirky user agents leads to a quirky 
product that will require future maintainers to unnecessarily 
familiarize themselves with the quirks.

Another benefit of web standards, and standards in general, is that they 
provide the developers of access devices with an established format to 
which to design their devices for. The alternative is to either mimic 
another device's bugs or to create a new, unique interpretation of web 
languages that may or may not to compatible with other access devices. 
Either of the these alternative approaches leads to a "wild west" 
scenario where one could never be sure of that the current, ad hoc 
authoritative implementation will still be dominant next year or next 
month.

A couple oldie, but still good reads on this topic are:

Site Valet - Why Validate?
<http://valet.htmlhelp.com/page/why.html>

4 Reasons to Validate your HTML 
<http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/reasons.html>

For additional reading pleasure attached below are a few links related 
to a presentation that I've given regarding web standards.

*General Reading on Web Standards

Zeldman, J. (2003). Designing With Web Standards. Indianapolis: New Riders.

Cederholm, D. (2004). Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style 
Handbook. Berkeley, CA: Friends of ED.

SimpleBits | Web Standards Link Bonanza
http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2004/06/21/bonanza.html

What Every Web Site Owner Should Know About Standards: A Web Standards 
Primer
http://www.maccaws.org/kit/primer/

The Way Forward with Web Standards
http://www.maccaws.org/kit/way-forward/

Design by Fire: The real reason you should care about web standards
http://www.designbyfire.com/000099.html

mezzoblue: A Roadmap to Standards
http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/04/30/a_roadmap_to/

mezzoblue: Standards Resources for Beginners
http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/08/25/standards_re/

99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete
An excerpt from Forward Compatibility: Designing & Building With Standards
http://www.digital-web.com/features/feature_2002-09.shtml

Accessibility benefits of "standards-based design" and "structural markup"
http://www.4serendipity.com/accessibility/struct/

*Bugs, Quirks, and Issues

4 Reasons to Validate your HTML
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/reasons.html

Toward a standard font size interval system
http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size_intervals/altintervals.html

Owen Brigss' CSS text sizing page
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/font/index.html
An overview of various CSS text sizing methods. Includes a nice 
selection of screenshots of each method in various browsers.

Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Images,_Tables,_and_Mysterious_Gaps
Explains how Gecko (Netscape 6+, Mozilla, etc.) renders images in tables 
when "standards" mode is triggered.

*Doctype Switch and Browser Rendering Modes

Summary of Doctypes and the layout modes they trigger
http://www.hut.fi/u/hsivonen/doctype.html

The Opera 7 DOCTYPE Switches
http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/doctype/

CSS Enhancements in Internet Explorer 6
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnie60/html/cssenhancements.asp
Details which Doctype triggers which rendering mode in IE 6 and lists 
some of the differences between the "standards" and "quirks" mode in 
this browser.

Mozilla's Quirks Mode
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/quirks/
Mozilla also provides a detailed outline of Mozilla quirks mode behavior.

Gecko's "Almost Standards" Mode
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Gecko's_%22Almost_Standards%22_Mode

Gecko Compatibility Handbook
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Gecko_Compatibility_Handbook
Discusses Gecko (Netscape 6+, Mozilla, etc.) standards support and 
solutions to common issues with this rendering engine.

*'Hiding' CSS links

Centrical's CSS filters page
http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/

Dithered.com CSS filters page
http://www.dithered.com/css_filters/

Hiding CSS with @import
http://w3development.de/css/hide_css_from_browsers/import/

CSS Wiki - CSS Hacks
http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=CssHacks

The Box Model Hack
http://tantek.com/CSS/Examples/boxmodelhack.html

Size Matters
An article detailing an implementation of the BMH to control font size 
across browsers.
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/sizematters/

Internet Explorer conditional comments
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/ccomment_ovw.asp