Out of the CSS Zen Garden and into Business
posted by DL Byron on June 17, 2004
A point we haven’t heard in the recent Scobelized Standards Backlash is the value of bandwidth reduction. For example, view source on MS.com and imagine how much bandwidth could be saved by cleaning up that code and reducing it. Yahoo, AOL, et al are moving to standards for that very reason. Why wouldn’t MS? Less important than the box model hacks, floats, and divs, is how a company can save money with Standards. Do it with tables if you must, but clean them up, and reduce that code. There must be real shareholder value in that. Veen wrote about it last year, in The Business Value of Web Standards, and I remember that as one of our top Standards evangelism topics. Lately, it’s all been about validation and how IE sucks.
As designers and developers, maybe it’s time for us to get out of out of the CSS Zen Garden and into business. To not evangelize beautiful CSS layouts as much, but the value of clean code. That’s not a discredit to the garden, what we’ve done or how much progress has been made, but what’s going to convince a business owner more? Spending days on a hacked, cross-browser, liquid, floated layout or a reduction in code and bandwidth?
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