How web standards protect the long term value of your website investment.
Who Should Read This Book
This eBook is targeted primarily for the business community as consumers of web design, marketing and development companies and web designers. We make a distinction between “designers/web marketers” and “coders” and often the public thinks they are the same person, which is very rare. Most “coders” find web standards natural and gravitate to using them quickly. Designers and web marketers, on the other hand, don't have to deal directly with the immediate raw benefits of standards so they are easier to ignore. The success of standards is dependent on educated consumers that demand the benefits that standards will provide. Ignorance is not bliss and will only prolong the damage of the browser wars. It is also hoped that the web development community, especially designers and web marketers, also become better educated in understanding the benefits for their customers.
Table of Contents - 24 pages
- Introduction
- Who Should Read This Book
- The Benefits of Standards
- A Bit of History
- Historical Consequences for Business
- The State of the Web Development Industry
- An Experiment
- What Does This Mean?
- A Sad State of Affairs
- Benefits of Web Standards
- Benefits of Web Standards for Business Sites
- Consistency in Image and Branding and User Experience
- Content Management
- Structure and Design Development
- Information Technology
- Benefits of Web Standards for Business Sites
- Building a Standards Based Website
- How do I find a web developer that will build a standards based website?
- Cost/Benefit Matrix
- Wrapping It Up
- References
Sample excerpt from ebook
Historical Consequences of Browser Wars for Business
The browser wars encouraged three specific kinds of behavior among their combatants that had specific consequences for businesses developing websites.
- Adding new features instead of fixing bugs: A web browser had to have more new features than its competitor, or else it would be considered to be "falling behind." But with limited manpower to put towards development, this often meant that quality assurance suffered and that the software was released with serious bugs. Customers fighting bugs in their browser are not going to focus on doing business on the web.
- Adding proprietary features instead of obeying standards: A web browser is expected to follow the standards set down by standards committees (for example, adhering to the HTML specifications) in order to assure interoperability of the web for all users. But competition and innovation led to web browsers "extending" the standards with proprietary features without waiting for committee approval. Sometimes these extensions produced useful features that were adopted by other browsers but in the short term it created costs for website owners.
- Inadvertently creating security loopholes: In the race to add development features, the line between document and application is crossed, and the Active Content Exploit is born. This is because, whenever applications have been allowed to masquerade as documents, anyone can slip malicious code into what is otherwise a trustworthy format. As a virus scanner can only detect a virus that is old enough to be catalogued (usually more than 48 hours), it cannot protect against an attack. Thus, this blurring of the boundary between application and document creates an easy access point that is the basis for delivery of nearly all of today's drive-by downloads and auto-loading malicious code. Again, businesses suffer because trust in the platform is lost. Who would do business at a location where there might be a “drive-by shooting”?
“Times, they are a changing” - for the better, but they are not where they should be. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) was formed and active in 1997. But it was not until the browser wars were over and the true scope of the collateral damage was understood that the W3C became a force in guiding the standards. Browsers are like big ships and it takes time and resources to move from the mess of the wars to a point where a web page could be built on a single code base for all browsers. This is still in progress and we are getting closer to that dream. This ebook will explore why Web Standards are not only good for your business but provide insurance against obsolescence, by making sure your website is built correctly to leverage those benefits.
