HTML: Sticking to Standards

By Neal Thomas, updated by Duane Taylor
January 2001

Standards for writing HTML code are continuing to evolve. The World Wide Web has grown in fits and starts. It has grown up with competing standards, technologies and concepts that became popular then disappeared, and hundreds of workarounds and short-term solutions that have kept the system alive and running as well as possible.

HTML 4.0 is the best articulation so far of the need for standardization of documents. It allows for the kind of robust information sorting and categorization that are critical to maintaining useful knowledge systems. At the same time, it puts tools in the hands of graphic and information designers so that they can offer high quality experiences for Web users. Most importantly, HTML 4.0 separates the language of Web site development, divorcing the layout information from the content itself so that one is not compromised by the other.

This is significant for a few reasons. First, the adoption of HTML 4.0 and style sheets will allow content to be designed just once, but presented across many platforms. This is very important considering that new technologies put the Web in many new situations. E-mail and Web pages can now be retrieved from cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), televisions and, soon, other devices. Formatting Web pages for use on one particular platform to the exclusion of others may shut out important users. When presentation is divorced from content, you can change the information without rendering the content illegible. A PDA user can request a Web page and the server will send a page that is customized for a small screen. A visually-impaired user will receive a page optimized for speech synthesis and so forth. Standardization enables this kind of write-once-publish-anywhere scenario.

Second, the move towards standardization will ensure that everyone uses the same language on the Web. Standardization will provide us with a universal mechanism to indicate language for a given Web page—not just to the user, but to search engines and databases as well.

Third, it will allow for much more robust searching capabilities. By eliminating layout code from a document, the search engines can focus on content. Improvements in searching algorithms and the use of meta-data will further enhance the quality of search engines on the Web.

It is advisable to internalize the importance of standardization. It can lead to many workflow improvements and will make sites easier to find, easier to use and it will generally improve the quality of information on the Internet. Standardization will allow organizations to reach wider audiences with their message—the purpose of having a Web site in the first place.