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27 January 2004

Gone are the tables, gone are the javascript remote rollovers - is this a brave new world of web standards?

Well, yes and no...

The new millenium dawned with new web browsers appearing that did something quite amazing - they started to follow web standards and offer an alternative to the browser-specific - and costly - coding of web pages.

There were still two major problems though. The first would be expected - it has taken a long time for enough users to change over to new, compliant browsers. The second problem ought to be expected as well - the new browsers still have bugs and treat CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) differently. This means that it is still necessary to use work-arounds in code and test in many different browsers.

The good news is that it is possible to write one page instead of several, linked to one or more style sheet files. This means a big saving on future maintenance of pages - in theory, compliant pages should work in all future browsers, including PDAs and other hand-held devices

So should we change all our sites to pure-CSS Web standards compliant code?

No, not yet. But it is worth changing over to xhtml 1.0 transitional, using css style sheets for as much of your presentational information as possible and minimising the use of tables used for layout.

When web-standards-compliant code looks different in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP to the way it looks on Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000, you know there is still a way to go before we reach Utopia.

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SouthernFjord Web Development is based in Stavanger, Norway but also works with customers in the UK. We have been developing web sites since 1999 and offer a range of other services.