One of the big Web 2.0 things is the push towards designing website using standards.

By designing sites with standards in mind, we mean to design using CSS and HTML (although more commonly now, XHTML), not old table based layouts or CSS with hacks thrown in to get sites to work in all browsers.

The problem with this is often related to the browsers themselves. Back in the 1990’s with the Microsoft vs Netscape war, neither browsers supported CSS properly, and as such web designers had to use alternate methods to make their sites work and display properly for everyone. For many this meant to use tables to produce a layout despite tables not being there to produce layouts. The use of tables to design sites had it’s advantages in that a site would display the same in all browsers but it has many disadvantages.

Firstly, tables usually require more code to be written by the designer, which leads to larger file sizes. Whilst this has never really been a problem due to the still relatively small file sizes, it is in-efficient, and we are always searching for more efficient ways to do things.

The use of tables and other work-around methods is also misuse of HTML. For example, tables were not designed to be used with layouts. They were designed to list information in a table. The <b> and <strong> tags were also not designed to make text bold to indicate a heading, we have the <h1> style tags for that.

Thirdly, the use of many work-arounds, including many table based site layouts, leads to a design that is too rigid and does not scale properly depending on the requirements of the end user. Despite a designer using work arounds to make sure that sites are rendered the same by all browsers, this is not what is needed. Elements, particuarly text, need to be scaled to be viewed best in the user’s browser. To make sure that all users view a site properly text should be scaled depending on the users setup. It is for this reason that when using CSS many will set text sizes as either a percentage of the default font size or as an “em” value, which simply means a size based off of the size of a lowercase M in the default font size.

Unfortunatly whilst many web designers are moving towards standards based design not all browsers properly support standards, the biggest problem being with the most widely used browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Whilst MS say that support for standards will improve in the next version of Internet Explorer, there is a possiblity that they will still not be properly supported. Even if MS do get it right and we have proper support for standards it will be a long time before the vast majority of internet users are using a browser that properly supports standards. Because of this, many designers are still having to develop two versions of their sites, one for IE users and one for everyone else, or use hacks and custom tweaks to make sure IE supports their sites.

The aim of standards in Web 2.0 is therefore to promote and improve the usability of sites and drag the web to accomodate everyone independant of their setup.

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