Web standards for online businesses in Mauritius.

There’s a lot of talk over the advent of the Internet in Mauritius and l’Express even had an article on the new practices over the Internet especially concerning on line purchases, Internet banking or job seeking (though I doubt that it is a good thing to compare online shops in Mauritius with business models such as amazon or ebay). Internet is slowly getting into people’s lives and is getting importance in terms of transactions. More and more of them are secured online.

Most of the sites presented have good motives to be online and try to get things going but some important concepts have been ditched. Web standards, usability and content. This might explain the difficulties some of them have to be profit making sites. In this series of articles, a thorough analysis of standards and usability will be done trying to explain where the cogwheel gets stuck. Please bear in mind that the analysis isn’t here to bring down the site but to show that “professional” companies are not following standards and are selling low-end applications to customers. Let’s not forget that Mauritius is budding in the Internet field and that bandwidth still has to be enhanced. People need fast and usable solutions!

Why standards?

First things first. I am a stickler to standards. They are good practices to keep your site running and allow it to survive all major browser changes. This also ensures that the website looks the same (thus, ensures return on investment) in all browsers and you don’t have to give instructions to your visitors to have them changing their resolutions or browsers. One of the worse examples on the concept is the Government of Mauritius website’s disclaimer

This site is best viewed at 800 x 600 resolution with Internet Explorer 5.5 (SP2)

What do standards bring you then? And why code a site according to these?

Page Weight

Using CSS in a separate and XHTML allow the distinction of markup from the presentational layers of the pages. This reduces the page weight of the document. Using CSS in a separate file which will only be imported when necessary reduces the number of times the presentational layers will be copied yielding into a general lightweight site. The CSS file being cached just on the first page, it is not downloaded again when a new page is loaded thus calling only the light page. Major websites save quite a lot of bandwidth through this as smaller ones have faster loading pages? Once again, the Mauritian Government website shows the discrepancies of not using standards and the impact on page load time.

Ease of maintenance

Let me tell you a secret word: semantic. A semantically correct code is self documented and is easily understood when it comes to maintenance. A div is a division block, a h2 a heading and a ul an unordered list. Building web pages on this good assumption makes that the code is meaningful. Thus, any developer can jump into the code and correctly and easily do the necessary maintenance.

SEO and Accessibility

Using semantic code is also beneficial for your online reputation. Search engine robots are standards compliant machines. Using a h for a heading or a title gives them the information that the content in this particular tag is important (hence keywords in there will have more weight). With reduced page weight, hence code waddling, the robot will not have to choke on your in-line styling and try to differentiate what is code and what is content. It will just gather the information and index it.

In the same way as robots have to analyse clean code, visually impaired persons navigating do not need presentational layers and just need clean semantic code. Many of you will tell me, Internet is not enough into people’s lives in Mauritius for this. Answer: so what? The country will be evolving and Internet services also. Let’s just imagine that a visually impaired person gets the Internet and uses the Lynx browser to buy his vegetables online at tantebazar.com will end up seeing a nonsense page like this one. While this site might be offering useful services and might also get a niche market by proposing to visually impaired persons to have their goods delivered at home, its coding is hindering it. Ok, let’s admit it, Compnet, the webdesign company which built the site doesn’t state the use of standards in its TOS.

Extensibility

Need to redesign, to add up new content, to make a printable version of your web page? A well structured and semantic website is optimised for this. You can do amazing things with such usage. CSS Zen Garden shows how you can change the whole design of a website without ever having to modify its markup.

Can’t do it?

Now, if you’re a Web Design company coming round and your client asks you for a great standards driven and accessible website and your answer is “can’t do it”, you just have to leave the business. Moreover, if you are thinking about telling your client that you can’t have great looks and good markup you’re wrong once again. Here view source for an inspiring glimpse of how semantic and accessible even a grid-based, image-intensive, pixel-perfect site can be. The only limit must be your inspiration and not your web designing and coding skills.

Conclusion

Not only do web standards help you as the developer, they also help your clients, and their audience. By conforming to today’s standards and accessibility guidelines, you can ensure that the content is available to all users, regardless of the device they use to access it. Combine this with bandwidth savings, ease of maintenance, and extensibility. In this time of evolution of the web in Mauritius, the designers taking the step towards standards will be those getting ahead of the others. When clients will start requiring standards, you’ll be prepared for this.

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Category: Standards and code