What standards do exist?
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has defined several standards which are important for Web designers. Today, the most important standards are the HTML 4.01 standard, finished in December 1997 and the CSS 2 specification, finished in May 1998.
If you've worked on the Web, you surely know HTML. HTML is a markup language. Markup? Yeah, right. This means that HTML doesn't allow you to design a document perfectly the way you want. It allows you to publish information in a structured format, but it doesn't allow you to put your Corporate Identity on the Web.
But everyone now thinks that design is an important part of marketing and you want to tell me that the core language of the Web isn't able to design my documents?
Yep, you're right. But wait, don't run away. All this people who want to put there CI on the Web aren't wrong. That's why there's a solution. Use CSS. CSS is exactly for that purpose. Because the W3C really doesn't want to kick all this designers out of the Web. With CSS it's possible to design your Web site pixel by pixel. No more dirty one-pixel-gif work!
I hope, I picked out some good points to convince you. If not, please mail me. I might create a FAQ list, if there is enough feedback.
Using the standards
Let's now assume, that you're planning to use strict HTML 4.01 and CSS 2 for your next project. I warn you, there are some things to know before you should even consider this.
Both standards have existed for more than three years. Knowing the fact that the important companies have worked hand in hand with the W3C, you might think that this standards are now well supported, don't you? Sorry, I have to disappoint you. The two big players in the market, Microsoft and Netscape don't fully support this two important standards. No one does, although some implementations do quite well. For example the Mozilla project, the open-sourced Netscape browser or Opera, one of the small players in the market.
The HTML part isn't difficult and most browsers do quite well. If you've read the standard, this won't surprise you very much, because HTML is very small. The more difficult part is CSS. CSS is very complex and as far as I know there isn't any single browser out there today (Jul 16, 2001) that fully supports CSS2. And CSS3 is already in the pipeline... Doesn't matter, the most important parts of CSS are implemented acceptable by most browser vendors. Spare Netscape 4, but I think this can soon be ignored. In my opinion Mozilla, the successor of Netscape 4, is doing better than ever.
My experiences
You've got an overview about the two standards I'm discussing today. Now I'm going to tell you about the experiences I've made when sticking on CSS and HTML.
This spring I redesigned the website for my Windows tool Bookmark-Manager. I decided to try out standard compliant Web design. It went very well. All the points I'm listing here proved right even for such a small site!
1. Ease of creation
Over all I had less time to spend for optimizing for browsers than ever. Why? The standard is well defined, written down and there's a tool to check the standard compliance of a page. If you try to create 'browser friendly' pages, you don't have access to good resources to test the 'browser compliance'. This leads a try & error procedure. If you've ever done this, you know how awful this is. If you haven't done this yet, do it for a large page or just believe me.
2. Focus on content
The Web was created to link content together. It's now abused for marketing purposes. Some people summarize the whole development of the Web with something like this. Me too.
But I'm not writing to summarize anything. I'm writing this document to fully show you my point of view. I work for a company which mainly creates Web presences. Of course design is very important there, because we're working for big companies and they want to sell their brand. But selling a brand isn't done with a great design, at least not on the Web today. On the Web there are always a lot of competitors very near. And changes are now bigger than ever that their Web presence is designed very well, too. This is where content comes in. I decided not to give you a big example, I think I made my point, didn't I?
Now I hear you asking:
What has all this to do with standard compliance?
Ok, let's start. Because now you don't have to fiddle around with all this nasty browser implementations, you can focus on the content. You have a lot more time for writing and marking up your content. Sorry, I can't write this simple fact in any scientific sentences. That's all you'll get.
3. Extensible
Assume you've just started your big-berta egg-shop, have a very nice design, you're getting good press coverage, the banks are throwing the millions after you, customers are killing to get your eggs... One word: It's a big success. For my example it doesn't really matter if it's a success or not, I just wanted to exaggerate a bit.
Now let's assume, it is early in December and you're company has a new product called 'Christmas egg' with cinnamon in it. Hey, it's the 21. century, everything is possible! To generate the best value with this new eggs. The big boss is planning an expensive media campaign, your boss (responsible for the Web presence) wants to promote the eggs on the Web site and his secretary wants a yellow egg on the top right of every page. Now it's up to you. Remember the old days? Already stressed with all the other ideas of your bosses, you would now start to hack a dirty table and carefully place the egg on the top right corner... Just to realize it doesn't look good with Netscape. Or worse yet, your boss decides to put that egg in the bottom right corner so you have to start again. You get the picture, I'm not responsible for your nightmares, OK?
But you don't have all this problems now. I guess you'll need less than five minutes to implement all this. Not including the creation of the picture, of course. It's because of CSS. Did you guess it? CSS has support for absolute or relative placement of anything you wish. Now it's only a matter of creating a new <div> tag in a central include file (you have one, don't you?) and putting the right CSS declaration into your style sheet. If this doesn't save cost, what else does?
4. Portable
Hey, we don't want portability, we always use MS Windows!
Oh shut up. I don't mean this kind of portability. I'll tell you an example, again:
The 'Christmas egg' was a real big success. You now have about a dozen different 'Christmas eggs' with about the same amount of different sizes. So your company is now planning to create an own shop just for your 'Christmas egg collection'.
Let's remember the old days. You'd copy the whole shop and change the HTML code to fit your needs. If you've ever done this, you know what's the product: an unmaintainable shop, no one will ever like updating. I'll spare you the details, it's horrible. If you've never done this before, don't do it! I repeat: Don't do it, please.
Now let's go another way. Again, you copy the whole shop. But now (I'm assuming you're already using the standards, now) you don't have to change any HTML. Just open the CSS style sheet, change your parameters, go home and enjoy the warm afternoon with your wife or your girl friend.
Browser compatibility
I don't want to write too subjective. The dark side exists. On the dark side you'll find the browser vendors. CSS doesn't work very well with some current browsers. Of the current browsers, the worst one is Netscape 4. But there's light at the end of the tunnel. Netscape has open-sourced their browser long ago and called the project 'Mozilla'. An early release (0.6) of Mozilla was declared as final and published by Netscape Corp. I think this was one of their biggest marketing faults ever made. But we're here to discuses the technical stuff. Even this old and poor release is far superior to Netscape 4. (Of course this depends on the point of view. My point of view for this article is standard compliance.) The current Mozilla (0.9 at the time of writing) is even much better. You can now really use the browser. It's getting better and I think, the future is bright.
Don't let us forget one thing. Because the content is totally separated from the design, even with Netscape 4 it's perfectly possible to access all the content. For most presences, this is the most important part. As an example take my presence (The design isn't very good, I know though this doesn't have anything to do with CSS, but more with my talents). If you use Opera 4.x, Mozilla or a current Internet Explorer, you may find it quite nice. At least I hope so. If you're using Netscape 4, you won't see much of a design. But the content is still there.
Summary
If you have an important online presence it might be wrong to turn to CSS right now, because you may want your visitors with older browser to stay. But if you don't care about older browsers too much, be it because the presence doesn't generate money anyway, because it's an Intranet where you control the browser or you don't have any old browsers on your presence, I recommend you to change as soon as possible.
Feedback
I hope, you enjoyed reading through this text. My English is far from being perfect. Please mail me any spelling or grammatical errors you find. Also if there's any error in the content itself, please mail me. I'd love to discuss this topic with other interested people. Thanks for listening!