Web publishing standards

Web publishing standards can be separated into two categories:

1. those standards that apply to the client browser, and must be supported at least to some extent in any browser
2. standards that apply to the server, and therefore may or may not be applicable depending on whether the server delivers static web pages or dyamically generated content (via CGI, servlets, portlets, etc.), and will vary in level of support provided by different products depending on whether the vendor provides proprietary or open-source solutions

Advantages of designing web sites with the latest standards

Faster page loading

Putting the common content of your site's pages into separate template files, allows a browser to download the templates into cache just once for the entire site. Since the common elements can be half of the HTML code for typical web pages, moving them into templates can easily reduce the size of the files being downloaded by 50% or more.

Beware of some older design tools and web developers that duplicate the common elements on every single web page. This slows down page load times, increases bandwidth requirements, and makes the site much harder to maintain.

Since your site is probably being developed and tested over a high-speed LAN or broadband connection, it's likely that you would not even notice a performance problem that could seriously affect users who are not on a similar type of connection.

Retain more visitors

The longer pages take to load, the more likely that web site visitors will leave and go to another site. When your pages load faster, fewer visitors will be leaving your site to go to another, faster one.

Some might argue that since most users now have broadband connections, you can probably assume that users have high-speed Internet connections, and so page download time doesn't matter much any more. But this misses the fact that the number of cell phones and other wireless devices accessing the Internet with slower connection speeds has been continuously increasing. So you shouldn't assume that users have a fast connection because connection speeds are actually all over the place. And do you really want to lose visitors on slower connections, even if you assumed those users were only the ones on dial-up connections?

Lower bandwith costs

When the common elements of a web site's content can be cached, the bandwith requirements and the associated costs will be greatly reduced. If instead those elements are put into web pages on the server side and downloaded with every web page, page sizes and bandwidth requirements can easily be doubled.

Easier to maintain

When the common elements of your content are stored in one place, it makes your web site much easier to maintain. To change the look and feel of your site, you simply change the template in the one file containing the common elements. Changing individual pages is also easier, since those pages are not cluttered up with all of the common site elements.

Cross-browser compatibility

Sites designed for more recent standards are more likely to look pretty much the same in all current browsers. In addition, if the pages are small enough, they may even look acceptable when displayed on portable handheld devices.

Forward compatibility

As standards evolve, new versions are developed with backward compatibility in mind. When necessary for a change that introduces compatibility problems, those changes are typically made gradually over a number of versions and by gracefully deprecating the older specifications. Developing web sites to more recent standards will reduce the work needed to update a site as the standards evolve.

This discussion applies to web publishing standards for browsers, which are on the client side of an HTTP connection. From the browser's point of view, it doesn't matter how the pages are constructed on the server, whether they are static pages that are simply downloaded or dynamic web pages that are built on-the-fly by an application server. So you can easily tell whether a site is using templates by viewing the source after downloading a page in a browser. If, above the html tag near the top of the page, you see one or more xml-stylesheet processing instructions such as any of these examples:

then the site is using templates. If, on the other hand, there is no xml-stylesheet instruction before the html tag, you'll probably see HTML for common elements in the source for that page as well as duplicated in other pages all over the site, which indicates that there is a lot of wasted code and bandwidth.

Since there's no good reason at this point to be designing web sites that need to support 1997 HTML 4.x browsers, such as Internet Explorer version 4, using more recent standards provides all advantages and no disadvantages. So this should be a no-brainer unless you really want your site to cost twice as much for bandwidth, be more difficult to maintain and to lose visitors.