Separating the Content from its Presentation

The main idea behind the concept of separating the content from its presentation is to allow website developers a useful framework to develop their website giving them the ability to change the website’s appearance whenever they like without needing to redo the content structure. This article will explain the rationale behind separating content from presentation.

Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t just one method for implementing this concept. More than that, since the introduction of technologies such as CGI, ASP, and PHP that allow web developers to generate dynamic web pages, a lot of companies have found creative ways to develop their website applications using this concept as their foundation.

Over the past few years, the internet community has been trying to create a set of standards for creating web sites. A new technology called CSS or Cascading Style Sheets has been introduced. There is nothing actually new in the way CSS handles a web page’s presentation. CSS allows the developer to define a style for each html tag element. This is similar to the method developers (programmers) used in the old days when they attached a variable to each html tag defining its style. The major difference is that CSS style definitions can be interpreted by most of the existing browsers available while in the older method the dynamic web page engine performs the interpretation.

The internet standards organization W3C has encouraged the use of CSS by enhancing its ability to control the web page’s look and feel. New style options have been added to the CSS specifications that have not been added to the HTML description language. There’s no doubt that this was a smart move. It’s forced web developers to use CSS to achieve an attractive web page that also supports the principle of content separation. Unfortunately CSS did not find its way into the internet mainstream easily because of compatibility issues with most web browsers. These days CSS is widely supported by most of the major web browsers, while CSS2, an enhanced version of CSS still has serious compatibility issues.

Obviously, the separation of content from its presentation deals not only with the styling aspects, but also with browser compatibility issues. The styling aspects were the first to be handled by web developers and web designers. As the complexity of information technology (IT) systems become increasingly more difficult to maintain, the internet community is looking for a solution that will become a standard so that content can be easily be managed. One goal for this standard is to define a “language” that IT systems can “talk” with each other and exchange information. Large corporations have historically used many different software platforms in their networks to conduct business. Internet based applications can provide a single platform that can act as an intermediary between all of these different systems and allow communication between them.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) has been adopted as a standard to present the content itself. OFX (Open Financial Exchange) is a close relative of XML that has been widely used by financial institutions who have been using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems to transmit orders and invoices over private networks, intranets and the internet for several years.

The need to present the content in a standard way that separates it from any design elements was so urgent that for the first time in software development history all the three major players (SUN, IBM, and Microsoft) actually agreed with each other and XML become a standard almost overnight and was adopted by many content providers and news agencies.

Yet the concept was not fully implemented. CSS handles the styling aspects while XML handles the document content. What about the webpage layout? New websites are been published each day by thousands. Every day millions of new web pages are being added to the internet’s global database. Webmasters have found that changing the page background color or the font color might not be enough to keep their website fresh and polished to compete with other new websites. However, changing the website layout can sometimes involve a lot of effort because it involves modifying the web page source code. XSL was introduced to solve that issue. Consider XSL a set of rules that can describe a web page layout. Combine it with XML (and optionally with CSS) you will get a valid html file.

XSL is very similar in its mechanics as any other dynamic web page generator. Beside the fact that XSL is platform independent, its biggest advantage is that it can be processed on the client side. The web server sends the client the content using XML format and the layout definition using XSL format. By doing that, the load on the web server’s CPU is reduced allowing it to perform other tasks more quickly. However, XSL was not adopted by all the major web browsers. So unlike XML, XSL has not found its way to the market easily.

Before you run back to your desk and start redesigning your website according to these magnificent standards, you should be aware that those technologies are really not needed most of the time. In fact, using them unnecessarily can cause performance problems. CSS usually will not cause your system to slow down. Just try to keep your CSS file as small as possible. Many web developers maintain large CSS files with lots of unused style definitions. Deciding to work with XML is a serious decision. If your website generates dynamic web pages supported by databases like MySQL, adding additional XML functionality will definitely reduce your website performance. Sometimes you won’t have a choice and will need to upgrade your hardware to maintain your website’s performance. There is no rule of thumb for this issue. The decision should be based on each system and its engineering demands. My advice to you is to think two steps ahead. Try to predict what kind of future services your website will be providing. Plan your website properly at stage one and save yourself lots of effort later.

About the Author:
Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123.
WebDesigners123 connects the Web Designers with Webmasters who need their services.

Web Page Optimization

We all want to have the most attractive website that leaves a visitor wide-eyed and completely dazzled. Usually an extremely attractive website design involves lots of graphical elements, increasing the overall page size which causes the page to download slowly to the browser. This article will provide some useful tips on how to keep your website design attractive but still downloads quickly.

As the average internet bandwidth rate per computer is raising, more and more webmasters allow themselves to develop complex websites laden with heavy graphic elements. In extreme cases you can find websites that take as much as a few minutes to load their content in your browser. Of course the user will never wait that long for a website to load, and will move on to the next website in his search results.

So why are webmasters still developing slow loading bloated websites? Primarily due to a lack of knowledge of simple graphic optimization techniques that will allow them to maintain an attractive website while keeping the page size smaller.

How many of you are aware of the fact that a box with rounded corners can be achieved using CSS code only, without the need for any graphic image. Well it is possible! Before those of you familiar with CSS say that it cannot be done for every type of browser and a relatively high level of programming is required, I say that dealing with the most common mistakes web designers make regarding optimization can have simple solutions.

Never limit the web designer by placing any restrictions that impact the final outcome. You might make the claim that what a web designer can do with graphic software is impossible to implement by code. I disagree. When the design is finished and you are ready to slice it into small images to be used in the html code, your creativity is been tested. Everything you do at this stage will affect the total page size. If your design contains rounded shapes that overlap each other or areas with color gradients, then you must slice it carefully so the outcome is a small file size.

Let’s look at what efficient slicing means:

• Do not make large slices that contain lots of different colors. Use a small number of slices where each slice contains a limited number of colors.

  Do not make a large slice that contains the same graphic structure. Slice a small portion of it and duplicate it in your code. This is a very common mistake that webmasters/programmers make when dealing with gradient color background.

  Do not use JPEG file format all the time. In some cases a GIF format will be much smaller in size. A rule of thumb – a slice with high number of colors will be smaller in size using the JPEG format rather than the GIF format, and the opposite is also true. Check each option separately. Every 1KB that you reduce from the image file size will eventually add up to a significant reduction in page size.

  If you have text on a solid color background, do not slice it at all. Use code to create the background instead. Remember that you can define both the font style and background color of the area using CSS.

Advanced Techniques
Graphically optimizing a website is more than just knowing how to do image optimizations. There are some advanced techniques that required a high level of programming. CSS2 has much more to offer then CSS does. Although not all browsers have adopted this standard yet you should be ready for when they do. JavaScript also gives you a set of options to create some cool effects without needing to overload the page with Flash. Using limited tools like JavaScript compared to an advanced application like Flash to create the desired effects can be difficult. However think about the outcome. For a onetime effort you can differentiate your website from others. You will have an attractive professional looking website that loads quickly.

Back to the Future
As PDAs, smart mobile phones and mini laptops are used with wireless internet connections for internet browsing, publishing fast loading web pages will enhance the browsing experience not only for those using wide bandwidth connections but also will make the browsing experience user friendly (or may I say, bandwidth friendly) to the wireless clients.

For those who insist that web design optimization is not necessary because everyone will have high bandwidth connections eventually, I agree up to a point. However, the software companies are creating applications that use more bandwidth because they know it is available for them to use. Get used to writing well optimized web pages because this cat and mouse game will never end, and it is better to learn the rules of the game then it is to be bitten.

About the Author:
Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123.

WebDesigners123 connects the Web Designers with Webmasters who need their services.
You have permission to publish this article electronically, in print, in your e-book, or on your web site, free of charge, as long as thecontent and author bylines are included and not changed.

W3C and Validation

Who is W3C? W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium. The goal of W3C is to provide a set of web standard and guidelines that will help alleviate the problem of code incompatibility in the hundreds of different web browsers in use throughout the world today.

The standards are only a guideline, but smart web designers and web developers pay heed to what the organization has to say. In fact many of the web programming jobs found on web design freelancer job boards, specifically requests that the code used to build a website is W3C validated. Although fairly common for XHTML and HTML it is becoming increasingly important especially if the web site is a total CSS web site.

Tim Berners-Lee who pretty much invented the World Wide Web when he developed the first web browser back in 1989 and other industry pioneers created the consortium to promote the standardization of the technologies used on the World Wide Web. Without some level of standardization, the internet would not be a global medium it is today. Interoperability between different machines requires a standard interface and standardized data communication protocols to carry the information back and forth.

That is the W3C’s mission. To publish the standards necessary so that all computers can speak the same language and communicate and all web browsers render web pages so that look and act the same way. The consortium also engage in efforts to educate web designers and developers so they will work together to build their websites on the W3C standards.

Because of the work of the consortium, someone using a Macintosh in China or a windows XP machine in Canada can access a web page hosted on a Linux server in South America. If that web page was created using validated HTML and CSS code, the webpage should appear very similar and have the same basic functionality on all of the different operating systems and web browsers available.

Why is Using Standardized and Validated Code Important?
Although all web browsers understand and render HTML, they don’t all do it the same way. Each browser has proprietary extensions to HTML and CSS that it uses to create special effects because none of the standardized code can do what they web designers wants to do. The result is that code that looks and works great in Internet Explore may crash Firefox, Opera or Safari and vice versa. Unfortunately, many web designers choose to code for internet explore and ignore the other 35% of web surfers. There are hundreds of different browsers and more appearing as PDAs, cell phones and practically every other imaginable electronic device is being built to be “internet compatible”.

It is impossible to test your web pages on every browser. While testing on the major browsers will probably be sufficient for most people, web designers who want their websites to work on as many different platforms as possible can check the code they write to see if it meets the standards.

Why don’t all the web designers and web developers use W3C validated code?
They don’t use it because none of the most popular HTML editors generate 100% compatible code. The newer the standards, the less likely the code generated meet them. Of all the HTML editors available, Dreamweaver does the best job and Front Page the worst job. It’s not surprising that FrontPage, which is a Microsoft product, writes code almost exclusively for internet explorer. The rest of the popular HTML editors rank somewhere between FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

Hand coding is no guarantee that the code will meet the standards either unless the person writing the code is well versed in the latest standards. Another problem is that a lot of the fancier and nicer features available are not universally supported by web browsers. Many web designers and web developers choose to ignore the 35% of web surfers so they can use the effects they want to use. In some cases, the site looks ok but doesn’t have all the functionality. Drop down menus are a common element commonly used that don’t work in some popular browsers. A good web designer will add a text link somewhere on the page for the parts of the menu that don’t work in all browsers. That way, the majority of visitors get the cool features while the others can still get where they want to go.

Summary
As the number of web browsers continues to increase, standardized code becomes absolutely essential. If you use non-standard, non-validated code that doesn’t work in a particular browser, it is your fault. If you use standard, validated code and it doesn’t work, it is a bug in the web browser. The W3C organization offers an official public validator service at http://validator.w3.org.

About the Author:
Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123.

WebDesigners123 connects the Web Designers with Webmasters who need their services.
You have permission to publish this article electronically, in print, in your e-book, or on your web site, free of charge, as long as thecontent and author bylines are included and not changed.

Web Design Guidelines

The goal of most web designers is to create an attractive, easily accessible and functional website that will convince the visitor to do something. Creating such a website requires good graphic design, easy and intuitive site navigation, logical site layout and good web copy. The following suggestions are general web design guidelines.

Web Content
You want the visitor to see you as a knowledgeable information source and/or a reputable business. Poor grammar and spelling will immediately reduce your credibility. Remember that people use the internet to find information. Whether you are selling your own product or recommending someone else’s products, you must first provide valuable information to the visitor or they will click away and find a website that gives them what they what they want.

Cross Browser Compatibility
There are at least a hundred different browsers in use. You must design your website to work properly in the most widely used browsers. To do that you may not be able to use all of the really great special effects that are available because they may not be supported in most browsers.

Even though most web browsers are free, people do not necessary bother to upgrade to the latest versions. The average surfer may not know how to upgrade their browser or have the attitude, “If it works, don’t fix it.” Remember your visitor may have a PC, a MAC, a Linux box, a PDA or a cell phone and they all use different browsers.

Good web design requires your web pages to work in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Opera and Safari at a minimum. Validating your HTML code will help but the final test is to view your website in different browsers running on different platforms.

Graphics and Photos
Web surfers are impatient and studies show that most people will click away if a webpage takes longer than 10 seconds to load. Always optimize your photos and other graphic files to have as small a size as possible without sacrificing picture quality.

Always use the height and width attributes on the picture so the rest of the page can load while the graphic files is downloading. Use the ALT HTML tag so people with graphics turned off and those using hand held devices know what the picture is supposed to be.

Background Colors
If you use anything other than white behind text, be sure to specify link colors otherwise the user’s browser defaults will determine what color the links are which can make them unreadable.

Multimedia
Multimedia is composed of flash movies, video clips, audio clips and background music. Always use streaming media because it reduces download time. Make sure the visitor can stop and start multimedia files or in the case of flash introductions, skip them if they want. That way people with slow connections or devices that don’t support multimedia can ignore them.

Also, put any important information presented in multimedia in text as well so the visitor has access to that information without using multimedia. If a plug-in is needed to use the multimedia, always provide a link to it so the user can install it. Finally, always remember the 10-second rule for site loading when deciding to use multimedia.

Site Navigation
Site navigation should be simple and intuitive. Studies have shown if a visitor cannot access the information they want within three clicks, they will leave the site. This is called the 3-click rule. Every area of your website should be reachable within three clicks from anywhere else on the site. If you use anything other than simple text links, make sure to test your navigation in all the major browsers.

Links
Periodically test all site links to be certain that they are valid. Nothing chases a visitor off faster than broken links. There are several free online services that will periodically check your links.

Frames
Avoid using frames, since they make it difficult to bookmark individual pages on your web site and you want people to bookmark pages so they can come back.

Summary
Good Web design is a combination of common sense and good planning. Your site should be attractive and easy to use and most importantly provide the user with the information or services they want.

About the Author:
Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123.

WebDesigners123 connects the Web Designers with Webmasters who need their services.
You have permission to publish this article electronically, in print, in your e-book, or on your web site, free of charge, as long as thecontent and author bylines are included and not changed.