Web Standards in Practice

Eric Eggert

yatil!

About me

A short summary:

• In the Web since 2000
• „Web Standards-Evangelist“ since 2002
• Inspiration: Zeldman, Meyer, Oxton, Bowman, Shae

Projects:

• Blogs & Articles: yatil.de
• Webmontag
• Webkrauts

Webkrauts

A couple of Web Designer and Developers whose aim is to enforce the adoption of Web Standards in Germany.

• Founded by Jens Grochtdreis in August 2005
• 70 Members (majority passive)
• Big yearly project Web Standards Advent Calendar
• Translation of English articles into German and own articles: webkrauts.de

Modern Web Standards

• Text-Markup: HTML 4, XHTML 1
• Design: CSS 2.1
• Behaviour: JavaScript
• Data: XML
• Data Transfer: XMLHttpRequest (new)

Where’s Ajax???

Ajax is by no means a Web Standard, but a term for a serveral Web Standards working together.

• Asynchronus
• JavaScript
• And
• XML

Ajax provides access to server side content without reloading the site.

Examples for Web2.0/Ajax Websites

• Flickr
• Google’s Mail, Maps und Calendar
• Yahoo Maps, MSN Maps
• MySpace

Do these Websites use Web Standards? No!

Then, why should I care?

• Valid documents reduce the possibility of errors
• Seperation of content, design and behaviour
• Great adaptability
• Extensible documents
• Prepared for future
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Accessibility

Should these Websites use Web Standards? Yes!

Why don’t they use Web Standards

There are serveral „arguments“:

• „It’s just a grown application“
• The tools are live, so you can’t change it so easy
• There's no sense for Web Standards in the companies

There are efforts to emphasize Web Standards in their work.

Basic rules for creating Sites?

• Valid, semantic (X)HTML
• Valid CSS
• Unobtrusive JavaScript

Web Standards in the Wild

• Valider, semantischer (X)HTML-Code
• Valider CSS-Code
• Unobtrusive („unaufdringliches“) JavaScript
• Strikte Trennung von Markup, Style und Behaviour

Microformats

Earlier presentation about microformats