Web standards can save your business money

As I blogged earlier, I’m reading kernel development. Now for a day job, I’m creating a web application using some java frameworks. As view layer jsp was chosen. Now I had to start from the existing application, so I cleaned the html using dreamweaver and put all the display in 1 CSS file.

Now my project is going live on monday and I’ve tested all the functionality and everything should be okay. So I started reading designing with webstandards. I’ve already read +100 pages in it. It’s really a good book and reads very nicely. I recommend it to everybody who does web development. The author made a very nice point. He was explaining the fact that if you use webstandards, you split your design in to html/xml/xhtlm and CSS. Because your html/xml/xhtml is only content and no layout it gets much smaller thus less bandwith has to be used. Your css is mostly cached by the browser so this doesn’t get send on every visit. Big deal well actually yes. Imagine you have a site that gets 100.000 request a day. You prolly have a contract with your ISP for X Gig of traffic, now imagine every page would be 80 k, that would result in 7,812 Gig of transfer okay that’s not that much but imagine your google and you would have to pay for transfer (I doubt they have to). The get millions and millions requests a day. If you could decrease your page size to 40 k. You would have half the transfer. So instead of 200 Gig you would have 100 Gig. Now that suddenly is a lot and could save your company a big sum of money.

Another good point he made was ‘ffcourse compliance and portability. If you’re using webstandards, chances are your site isn’t that bad on portable devices, screenscrapers,… So imagine in the future your boss wants to have his site available from a smart phone or pda. If you wrote your web tier web standards compliant it should work out of the box. By work I mean, all the functionality should be available. Another investment saved.

And yet another point (this time I heared in on a podcast) if you use web standards, your site should be accessible to blind people. A thing I never really thought off. But those people to use computers. Just imagine if a blind person should go to a site thats fully done in flash, its utterly useless to him. I’m not sure, but I suppose a site that has a lot of markup and isn’t a valid xhtml isn’t going to look good on his interpreter (don’t know the exact word, sorry). On the same issue they also explained that AJAX is nice, but again for the blind people it renders a page useless. I haven’t looked into this yet, it could be that the AJAX triggers and results do get displayed to the user, so I’m not going discuss it, but it surelly makes you reflect your decisions when designing a website

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