Selling Web Standards 1

Posted by Colin A. Bartlett Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:16:00 GMT

It’s not often I link to Microsoft but they have an insightful blog post over on the MIX Blog. Molly Holzschlag discusses the business benefits of Web Standards.

For several years, we’ve been pushing standards-compliant sites to our clients and we receive very little resistance. Many of our customers just roll with whatever recommendations we provide, especially for new sites.

But when clients have an existing site, and we try to sell them on converting it into nicely formatted, semantic XHTML and CSS, it can be a challenge. We’ve found it helpful to document clearly for them the additional cost they will incur by having our developers wade through crufty nested tables and horrendous cross-browser compatibility. When laid out in dollars and cents, the decision becomes easier.

Short Introduction to RDFa, OWL and Microformats [LINK] 1

Posted by Justin Reagor Sun, 09 Dec 2007 18:29:00 GMT

I just started following the OntologyOnline project, and reading David Decraene’s blog.

He has an excellent post on Embedding OWL-RDFS syntax in XHTML with RDFa. It serves as a great introduction into RDFa, OWL, Microformats and “Web 3.0”. It also dives into the possibilities as to why these technologies haven’t gained much popularity in the online community. As well as whats higher up along the Microformats food chain.

I don’t like to LINK often, but when I do its for articles like this! I am on a constant battle trying to relate my web standards friends, with little Microformats knowledge, into why we need a more semantic web (and why we need to start considering these technologies).

CSS/XHTML vs. tables and crap

Posted by Colin A. Bartlett Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:35:00 GMT

While beginning a new project today, I quickly discovered that the HTML and CSS files supplied by the designer were clearly auto-generated from a program like Dreamweaver.

It soon became apparent that dealing with nearly half a dozen nested tables and a mess of a CSS (with some of the same font declarations repeated 10 times) was going to be a nightmare.

I undertook the task of rebuiding in real CSS with semantic markup and XHTML. It’s taken about 3 hours for the rough cut. I still have some tweaking for IE and such but basically, it’s done. It’s clearly, far easier to read now. But I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves:

Before:
  • 371 lines
  • 13,213 chrs
After:
  • 279 lines
  • 7,173 chrs

That’s nearly a 45% reduction in the number of characters. One place in particular went from looking like this in the Firebug Inspect window:

 div < td < tr < tbody < table < td < tr < tbody < table < div <
td < tr < tbody < td < tr < tbody < table < td < tr < table < body < html
To this: 
 div < div < body < html