Standards Savings, My Take

Eric Meyer reviews an article about saving money using standards based design Eric’s Archived Thoughts: Standards Savings. One thing that he notes is that end users often see faster pages but smaller companies don’t see a savings in bandwidth (due to flat bandwidth rates). However, I propose another form of savings. Harddrive savings. This site is on a plan that costs me USD $10.00 a month, if I go over my three gigabytes of traffic I pay more. If I go above the thirty megabytes of storage space I have to either pay a fee or upgrade my plan to include more storage. Here’s the thing, if you use a static website with semantic markup you’ll probably have room on a server for a lot more products, press releases and pictures due to ‘skinny’ markup.

Another point to make in this discussion is that you can write semantically marked up pages that are as ‘fat’ as old-style pages. Granted you have to try, but if on a forms page you use the myriad of tags available to you you could find yourself with a heavy page. That said, it is most likely much more accessible. Being accessible, more usable and ready for most user scenarios outweighs any loss in download speed. However, it does bring to mind the need to be careful how you markup your page. It may lead you to choose a select form element rather than radio form elements when the options get long. If you use a label for each radio button you’ll most likely get some pretty bloated code. fieldset, legend and label are all useful for making nice, semantic forms, but they can bloat your page. accesskeys as accessibility helpers (ignoring discussions about what keys should or should not be used) add bytes to pages as well so keep your accesskeys under control.

In summary, you’ll see lots of discussion on both sides (pro or anti-semantic markup camps) about how the side has seen pages that do or do not achieve the claims of the other camp. The practitioner of the art is what makes the art stand out, however, the form of art does not cease to be good if one practitioner fails to execute well.

One thought on “Standards Savings, My Take

  1. Concentrating so much on html for size is a bit silly if you ask me. I did some quick research using http://www.apple.com and http://www.msnbc.com to determine what percentate the HTML was to their entire front page site weight. It turns out that those percentages are 13.6% and 21% respectivly (even though the msnbc site has horrid markup). At the end of the day, you can spend 5 hours stripping out an extra 10k of html code and undo all the benefit by adding a very small jpeg.

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