The Benefits of Website Building Using Web Standards and CSS
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by: Guest
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For anyone who is new to the subject of website building it\'s nice to get some background information and to see the bigger picture. It will also explain why I use the methods of web building that go into a website if a customer chooses to have one from my Web Design and Search Engine Optimization business.
For anyone who is new to the subject of website building it's nice to get some background information and to see the bigger picture. It will also explain why I use the methods of web building that go into a website if a customer chooses to have one from my Web Design and Search Engine Optimization business.
The construction of websites for many years, were produced using a language called HTML 4, which combined the content and text with all the coding which made up the construction of the page.
The governing body that oversees web standards the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) devised a coding (and which is continuously updated and improved) called XHTML/CSS which consisted of separating the structure of the page from the text content. This streamlined the whole operation resulting in less coding. Another big advantage being that if any major alterations had to be made the CSS file only, yes just one file, which contains the structure code of the page needed to be changed which then updates all the pages for the whole website. HTML4 works well enough but is (I think ) cumbersome and any alterations or maintenance can be difficult. It is, at the moment, intended to run as a choice for developers as to which he or she can use. However, (and it is my personal opinion) XHTML/CSS Web Standards will eventually becomes the de facto language.
Another advantage is less bandwidth which means less and faster transmitted (also quicker browser loading time) data is being up and downloaded from the Server and along with it less cost. After many years browsers like Firefox, Opera, Google's Chrome, and now, (well all most!) at long last with Internet Explorer 8 has caught up with W3C standards. As a footnote here there is an updated version in the pipeline called HTML 5 which helps to combine HTML and XHTML but its still in the experimental stages and it will be a while before all Browsers will adopt it, so that's not going to effect anything at the moment.
Still another advantage is improved search engine handling of sites with XHTML/CSS coding. By reducing the ratio of content to web structure code on a Web page makes the message of the page clearer to search engines and you are showing them the part of your page that is most important and will, in turn, help with with your sites ranking.
Going a tad technical here but its worth mentioning. The reason for the faster rendering of the page by the browser is once the CSS file has been downloaded, its held by the browser in the your PC's memory an any subsequent pages that are called only the XHTML file (which contains the content) is downloaded....Cool!
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