Web Site Coding Standards

This incarnation of the FORTH, Inc. web site was unveiled in 2004 and updated in 2010. External Design built it to comply generally with standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The site relies on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS 2.0) for layout and design details, and the markup language that describes the content of these pages adheres closely, in most cases, to Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML 1.0).

For this site, the adoption of standards lightens the byte-load (of the pages we sampled) by about one-third to one-half compared to other methods of achieving the same look and feel. For users, the lighter-weight pages also render faster because web browsers execute standard-compliant code more quickly.

The Standards

Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) is a mechanism for defining the style and presentation of web documents. It was formalized as a W3C recommendation in 1996, but faced initial resistance from developers and site owners because of poor support for it in the web browsers of that time. Today, however, all major browsers attempt to interpret standard CSS code correctly and they largely succeed. Standards-compliant browsers provide a more consistent platform for CSS, which is now embraced by most web developers as well.

Developers who use XHTML to designate the type of a page's elements, and not their style, are likely to find the content more easily ported to a variety of browsing environments, including mobile phones, PDAs, televisions and specialized browsing software such as screen readers.

Standards-compliant web content can be specified to render differently for each type of device. (As a very minor example, most printed versions of this site's pages do not display navigational elements because they are useless in hard copy.) This site does not yet make full use of alternate media in its CSS, but our adoption of these web coding standards makes it more likely to be achieved with minimal effort if and when conditions call for it.

Rationale

Complex HTML workarounds are still used by many web sites to control columns and margins and other layout elements. Such markup may inhibit the accessibility of the content on existing and forthcoming devices other than web browsers. They also create bulkier code that is more difficult to develop and to maintain.

The XHTML and CSS standards improve accessibility and enable more-consistent, reliable performance from web browsers. Used wisely, they can streamline the code, reducing bandwidth and improving both the developer and user experience.

In a Perfect World…

We would have preferred to keep this site free of workarounds that fix obscure rendering issues in specific browsers. We admit that this is not entirely the case. The fact remains: even modern browsers thought of as standards compliant carry slight discrepancies. We've done our best to ensure our site renders as consistently as possible, despite those differences. We apologize if our content is presented in a way that somehow makes it inaccessible in your particular configuration and circumstances.

To report significant bugs with our site's performance or to send other feedback, please use our contact form or send e-mail to webmaster@forth.com.