The Basic Concepts

Which are the basic concepts in standards compliant design? Semantics, Economy, Accessibility, Usability and Future-Enabling. Big words. Meaning what, exactly?

Semantics is a way of saying that we should use building blocks according to their intended use, and structure our layout according to the reading system. These are simple rules, right? Yet we insist, many of us, to use tables for structuring layout, we put headers inside paragraph tags, or we use tools that do it for us. We insist, many of us, to create what is known as invalid code. As HTML morphs into XML this practice becomes unacceptable, simply because XML requires the code to be written strictly according to rules. There are no ifs and buts about it. It’s how it is.

Economy means keeping your files light-weight and free of redundant tags. Using semantic layout is one step towards that; separating style from content is another. To properly separate the two we need to employ external style sheets, which means that we replace all the inline style tags normally found in an HTML file, with a style sheet that is called into action by one single line of code. That’s economy.

Accessibility —one of the cornerstones of standards compliant design— requires that both semantic and economic techniques are used. In order for a site to pass Bobby validation we need to structure the code semantically so that screenreaders can follow the proper ‘flow’ of the content matter, without being hindered by a mass of style declarations or similar things. Hence the need to use style sheets. But style sheets can also be used to good [accessibility] effect in their own right. Using style switchers, for instance, it’s possible to create multiple versions of one page—just by changing to a different style sheet—and thereby giving users the option of, say, higher contrast between text and background, changing text sizes without having the layout break, etc. This particular feature gives you bonus points when it comes to usability as well. Giving the user options is never a bad idea.

Usability is about putting the surfer in the driver’s seat, in a sense to hold back on your own grand schemes in favour of making your site easy and enjoyable to use. It has to do with simple things like following common style practices for link states, providing quick returns to previous page or start page (or both), providing a site-internal search facility, making contact information easily accessible, etc.

The next few articles in this series will look at these basic concepts with finer detail, these are just a few of the things you should be aware of. What they have in common is that they require some planning and thinking ahead, when building a site.