Cost of Non Compliant HTML Code

Clean Standards Compliant HTML Code vs Cost of Non Standards Compliant HTML Code

Have you encountered a website that causes your browser or computer to crash?

Most times this happens because the web page contains coding errors or the page author has used non standards compliant code or browser specific code.

Web pages are rendered using HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). As with any language there are rules/standards that should be followed. The HTML 4.01 Specification (rules and standards) are available at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/ and form part of the XHTML specification.

There are web pages with non compliant coding out there. Even the "big" guys have non compliant pages on the net. The pages produced may work in Internet Explorer (a very forgiving browser) but do not work in other browsers. Now, you are going to say that Internet Explorer has the majority of the browser market of the market. What about those who don't use Internet Explorer? Are you prepared to loose those visitors? They have money to spend too!

There are various costs associated with non standards compliant code.

Costs Associated with Not Using Clean Code and Non Compliant Code

  1. Lost sales. The page did not work properly so the visitor has moved onto another site.
  2. Lost visitors. The page takes too long to load because there is too much code to process before the page is rendered or the page doesn't render at all due to incorrect coding so the visitor moves onto another site.
  3. Search engines do not index pages because the search engine spider cannot read incorrectly coded pages resulting in lost visitors and lost sales.
  4. Building sites that are non compliant and/or with bloated html code can take hours to "fix" and clean up. This costs the business owner time that could be better spent promoting/servicing their business if they choose to do it themselves or money if they have to hire someone to do it for them.
  5. Require too many resources to maintain. Extra hosting costs, time to update.
  6. Bandwidth overage charges. When you signed up for your web hosting a certain amount of bandwidth was included. As your site becomes more popular your bandwidth usage will go up. When you go over the allotted bandwidth it will cost you extra and can throw your budget totally out of wack.

Benefits of Clean Compliant HTML Code

The benefits of clean standards compliant HTML code:

  1. Greater number of users are accommodated.
  2. Search engine spiders can read the search engine optimized content.
  3. Website will be more accessible.
  4. Building sites with standards compliant coding will degrade/last longer as the standards are upgraded. When a new standard is implemented it will take less work to upgrade.
  5. Lower cost of producing the website.
  6. Website will be backwards compliant as the browsers improve.
  7. Easier to maintain and update content.
  8. Website will be compatible with the current browsers and future browsers.
  9. Faster download time.
  10. Page(s) will be rendered faster.
  11. Page(s) will render better.
  12. The browsers are catching up with the standards.

As you can see, standards compliant clean code has many more benefits than non compliant and bloated html code.

Building a Website with Clean Compliant HTML Code

Building a website that uses clean standards compliant HTML code is not hard.

  1. Validate web page code.
    Code validation helps you eliminate problems so you have a better chance of your site being viewed by all on the net as intended. It also helps to create clean code.
  2. Clean up web page coding.
    When cleaning up/creating HTML code look for excessive or non compliant coding

Related HTML Coding Articles

If you found this web page a useful resource for your own website please link as follows:

HTML Basic Tutor - www.htmlbasictutor.ca/

Clean Compliant HTML Code vs Cost of Non Compliant HTML code. Building a website that uses clean standards compliant HTML code is not hard..
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