Free Letter

Open the eyes !

You are navigating in my web site. Some elements aren't correctly displayed or very nice. Keep cool, you don't have vision problem and i probably didn't make a mistake :) It said that this web site is accessible by any access method. But the access is totaly correct only with softwares respecting W3C standards.

Get two seconds to find the conclusion that we can now see as sun in the night : you aren't browsing with a tool using standards.

But what is a standard ? A standard is a norm defining a data exchange method, production method, ... Standards guarantee web pages interoperability. So, with only one source, you can serve all browsers of last generation (IE6+, Mozilla, Netscape 6+, Opera 6+, ...) and also devices with little screens (mobile phones, ...) or also voice browsers that read web pages aloud to people with sight impairments, Braille browsers that translate text into Braille. Making a web balkanization by specifics works technics is ended ! To get an answer to all yours questions about standards, my advice is to read the excellent Frequently Asked Questions of Web Standards Projects.

If you use standards, peoples using old versions of softwares can read your web site in degraded mode. For instance, style sheets are ignored. Yes it isn'it nice, but customers can read informations of your web site, they are not ejected because they don't have the software you want. And this is the most important !

If you had separated data and graphic design, in two minutes, you can modify completly the web site aspect. If you think about number of web site managed by professionals of web, so you can imagin the gain of time and so the gain of money ! A good implementation example is zen garden web site. Have fun by choosing a listed design. Only one file is different between each design : the CSS file.

Using standards permit to reduce bandwidth usage for two reasons. The first reason is because style sheet file is downloaded only one time and after it stay in browser memory. The second one is that if you use old methods to design your web site, so you use many tables and not visible images for each pages. By this way, you have many data to download. By using W3C standards, you can avoid 50% of downloads and queries. Finally you reduce bandwidth usage and you save resources of your web server.

And finally, we can also notice that this web site is readable by blind peoples. Why commercials web sites don't use standards ? Why blind peoples could not buy by web or use web services or simply surf as seeing peoples ? What can we think about actual institutional web sites accessibility ?

Last modification : 31 december 2003.