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In the World Wide Web, the battle for survival and supremacy can be reduced to two basic strategies. First, you want people to find you. Then, you want people to like what they see. Owners of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) know they need to be online to grow. Most small business owners are also cybercitizens; they realize that business websites can help them build an identity, widen their customer base, and provide 24/7 marketing services. What they don’ realize, however, is that simply being on the web won’t do the trick. But that’s getting ahead of the story.
Chaos in the Wild Wild Web
Tim Berners-Lee gave the Internet its Big Bang moment by inventing the World Wide Web, which was his way of making sense of all the technology currently available and make them work together seamlessly. Swamped by all the documents and data that needed to be managed, he rose above the chaos, looked at the big picture, and realized that he needed to make everyone speak and understand a common language. HTML was the answer.
Because this happened at a time when computer hardware technology was advancing rapidly, HTML also enabled computers to display content in a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) way, much like pages of a book or magazine.
The huge business potential of the World Wide Web was instantly recognized and a mere four years after Tim launched the first ever website in 1991, two giant browser companies were locked in a battle to dominate cyberspace. Microsoft and Netscape tweaked and modified HTML to such an extent they became proprietary and were virtually incompatible with each other. A website coded for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer would not display properly on Netscape, and vice-versa. Imagine your business today in this tangled wilderness then. You can’t, right? Imagine how irritating it would be for your customers to see a “Works best with Internet Explorer” when they’re browsing your broken site in Firefox on a Linux machine.
That situation threatened to fragment Tim’s big picture. The universal language which made this all possible was morphing into exclusive dialects that didn’t translate well. This despite the fact that a year earlier and perhaps because of the growing confusion, he co-founded W3C – the World Wide Web Consortium. When the browser war was raging, the standards set forth by W3C were in wide circulation, but they were largely ignored because software companies thought that the browser dominating the landscape would be able to impose its standards de facto. As the war escalated, this proved to be mission impossible. There was, however, a vision possible.
WaSP to the rescue
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Backed by w3c, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) was born. Glenn Davis, George Olsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded WaSP with the primary objective of convincing browser makers to support the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They knew that without a common standard, fragmented web technologies would jack up the cost of building and maintaining websites and consequently denying users access to services and content they needed.
By rallying a virtual Who’s Who of web design and development behind the cause, WaSP achieved its stated objective and by 2001, the browser war was largely over. However, Zeldman soon realized that it was one thing to make browsers agree to conform to a single standard and a totally different ballgame to convince programmers and designers to adhere to these standards. The former was easy. At most Wasp only needed to talk to five or six groups and convince them that common web standards a winning proposition. But how does one do that for the hundreds of thousands of developers and designers who code and create for the web day to day?
Fast forward to 12 years after the ceasefire and we’re now in world where Internet use is slowly migrating from fixed desktops to mobile devices with significantly smaller devices with extremely high resolutions. The war has shifted from browsers to mobile operating systems. iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, Firefox and a host of other startups are all jockeying for places in this extremely tight race. Clearly, the work of WaSP is far from over.
WaSP and small businesses
WaSP soon spawned many other projects, each with a different focus. Some, like A List Apart, advocate standard-compliant on design and content. Others, like Web Standards Sherpa, focus on education and the widespread use of best practices in web development. Another group overseen by Aaron Gustafson started an outreach project that educates small businesses about why they should care about web standards.
Why small business, in particular? Simply because they’re the sector that will benefit the most from online presence and e-commerce, and also because they have lesser resources to allocate to make this happen. Big companies get all the attention, but small businesses drive the economy. Consider these small business statistics excerpted by crowdsourcing advocate ICO from a report commissioned by US Department of Commerce and the Census Bureau:
- 99.7% of all employer firms are small businesses.
- Half of all private sector employees are employed by small businesses.
- Pay 44% of total U.S. private payroll.
- Generated 65% of net new jobs over the past 17 years.
- Create more than half of the nonfarm private GDP.
- Hire 43% of high tech workers (scientists, engineers, computer programmers, and others).
- 52% are home-based and 2% are franchises
- Made up 97.5% of all identified exporters and produced 31% of export value in FY 2008.
- Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms.
Web Standards
HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the backbone of the World Wide Web, uses tags to structure the different page elements and tell the browser exactly how to display them.
XML (eXtensible Markup Language) supports most of the fixed set of elements in HTML 4.0, but also allows customization of new tag elements according to a pre-set type definition or one that’s personally defined. XML is much more flexible than HMTL and is the standard through which the Web’s full potential can be achieved. It’s also the standard that allows easy transport of huge amounts of data.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are the mechanism through which changes in appearance and position can be assigned to HTML or XML elements, simply by declaring that they are of a specific style. The overall appearance of entire sites can be defined with CSS. To remodel the appearance only the CSS (not the individual elements) need to be changed. Less work, faster turnarounds, cheaper cost, and more reliable results.
DOM (Document Object Model) defines the logical structure of documents and the way a document is accessed and manipulated. With it programmers can create and build documents, navigate their structure, and add, modify, or delete elements and content. It can be used with any programming language in a wide variety of environments and applications.
ECMAScript (the standardized version of JavaScript) is a client-side, object-oriented scripting language that manipulates objects specified by the DOM. Through it, elements can be manipulated, moved, or have some properties changed, allowing Web developers to implement such effects as animated text and graphic rollovers that allow users to interact with the page and change its content without the need to reload.
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Why care about web standards?
The motive is simple. Businesses want all users to have access to their website from all devices using any browser running on any operating system powered by any platform. Sounds like a tall order? Fortunately, if a website is built to comply with web standards this shouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, this is not a given. Business owners will have to take it upon themselves to ensure that the people they hire will build the business website compliant to web standards. And comply they must for the following reasons cited by WaSP:
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Compliant web pages are easy to search
The structure is easy for search engines to access and evaluate increasing the chances that your site shows up in when relevant keywords are phrases are used in Google, for example. If you want to add a search function to your site to make it easier for users to find information, the same principle applies.
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Compliant web pages live forever
Old browsers, new browsers, and even browsers of the future can display your existing pages. No special effort is required. You don’t want to be spending on development or maintenance costs each time new web technology comes out, do you? Complying with web standards means you don’t have to.
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Compliant web pages are faster
There’s a rule of thumb that says it only takes users 8 seconds of waiting to cancel your page and move on to something else. Because web standards specify the separation of content from presentation, your pages need not load everything before it displays properly. Content can be fetched as needed by users.
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Compliant web pages perform better
Web standards allows you put in the bells and whistles to make your pages more interactive and enrich user experience without worrying that the fancy stuff won’t work.
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Easy conversion and migration
Your content can be exported to any format that serves the user’s purpose. Migrating content to new systems? No problem, because there’s a web standard for data transport that takes care of this. [XML]
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Pain-free maintenance
If it’s around long enough, your website will cycle through several batches of developers. If it complies with a commonly understood standard, new developers will have no trouble understanding how the site was originally built.
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Compliant web pages increase access
Online presence is all about access. Complying with web standards is the first step in ensuring that your content can be consumed by people with special or unusual requirements (e.g. those with disabilities). They will need special equipment to do this and that equipment will need to understand how to your website is built in order to render them in the manner required. These equipment will look for signals and cues specified by web standards. Also, there is a US government mandate for accessibility that comes with its own standards. Access is not just about people disadvantage by disability. It’s also about people with disadvantaged by infrastructure. If you’re running an online tutorial and education business, for example, and you want to reach globally to areas with low bandwidth then you will want to ensure that your site can be displayed as text-only pages.
FinancesOnline.com supports web standards
Because FinancesOnline.com is dedicated to the financial well-being of its users, we strongly support web standards for small business websites. We believe in the potential of small businesses to transform lives, as much as we believe that the Internet can transform small businesses.