XHTML and CSS

At the heart of XCO, USWeb's proven standard for web page design, is our reliance on Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), as recommend by the governing body of the web, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XHTML and CSS were designed to combat the undesirable coding practices that had infiltrated the web and to encourage the ideals of the W3C, particularly interoperability and future viability. Sloppy markup combined with unauthorized elements makes the web difficult to navigate - without standards, the web would be a mess of inaccessible code, incompatible devices, and innocent visitors struggling to find what they were searching for. USWeb's XCO standards include XHTML and CSS as the basis of advantageous web page design. Using XHTML and CSS together ensures the separation of structure & content from presentation, creating pages that rank higher, load faster, render correctly, and are accessible to the widest number of devices and users.

XHTML: Structural Advantage

XHTML uses the familiar vocabulary of HTML in a XML context. Like HTML, it describes the structure of web pages, but adheres to the more rigid rules of XML. The advantages of XHTML result from this standardization and include:

• Cleaner Code: Adherence to strict guidelines results in cleaner code. All extraneous or ambiguous elements are eliminated, so pages are smaller, load faster, and render correctly.
• Interoperability and Accessibility: XHTML is currently readable by the greatest number of browsers and devices, including PDAs, mobile phones, and assistive technologies like screen readers. Accessibility is quickly becoming a legal issue for major websites like Priceline and Ramada.com, who now must meet accessibility standards like Section 508 and reimburse the court for tens of thousands of dollars.
• Search Engine Friendly Code: XHTML produces pages that search engine spiders find easy to understand. There are no presentational elements or bloated code to confuse the spiders, so they'll crawl everything that matters and rank you accordingly.
• Future Viability: XHTML is THE standard for web page design. Adhering to it now will make any changes in the future easier to implement, ensuring your site will be usable in years to come. As the web increasingly moves towards an XML standard, you will already be positioned to take full advantage of the number of XML tools available to enhance your website.

CSS: Presentational Advantage

CSS, when combined with a powerful XML structure, gives websites a presentational advantage. It removes all stylistic elements from the markup and instead houses all the presentational information together, allowing for greater flexibility and consistency throughout your website. CSS strengthens all the advantages of using XHTML in web page design, but has some unique attributes that will improve user experience and maintenance cost:

• Design Consistency: With CSS, the same style elements can be applied to every page of a site. From the first page forward, your visitors will be presented with a consistent design scheme, building their comfort level and effectively promoting your brand. Pages will load faster and render correctly as browsers have already processed the style elements and don't have to contend with unfamiliar elements.
• Easy Maintenance: Changes to CSS web page designs are simple. Instead of having to go back and alter every single page of your site, with CSS only the relevant style sheets have to be updated, saving you hours of work and limiting the introduction of possible errors.