Pixel push no more

DigitalWeb ran a very nice article about better ROI through web standards. However, this is the part I really liked:

One complaint I hear when I recommend this is, “But the site will look different on different browsers!” My answer is always, “So what? How many users are using two different browsers at the same time and comparing what the site looks like in both of them?”

This is a point I’ve been making throughout my professional career—it’s simply not that important to make a site look exactly alike for every browser. In other words, now that standards and browsers have caught up to each other and are fairly mature in features in both regards, people are starting to get what the web has been about from the very beginning. That the value of hypertext is in speed, flexibility of display, compatibility and manipulation. Not in pixel-perfect renditions of print design.

But Alan K’necht puts the point in the form that business owners will get—in dollars and cents. Better search hits. Faster development times. Easier extensibility to alternate devices. Or just the plain fact that someone using an eight-year-old web browser might not be your target customer anymore.

And here’s another way of looking at the issue, especially from the SEO angle: some of these search engine optimization companies are essentially search engine hackers. They find the tricks and the holes in the system to make something rank higher than it already does. But this kind of service is a moving target: as the search engine plugs those holes, the hackers go and try to find new exploits. This is a highly questionable kind of business when you think about it, and there’s a reason why the search engines take quick action to correct these hacks. In the end, money invested in services like this disappears once the implemented exploit is patched. However, there’s one thing you can be sure of: The engines will always look to web standards first to build their indexes. As the SEO front gets more aggressive, the search engines get stricter. A page that conforms to standards is increasingly more important to a search engine because it is the least likely to have been tampered with, and you’ll find that your semantic tagging, detailed alt and title (and who knows, maybe even longdesc) attributes, and heavy separation of style into CSS will rank better over time without ever having to revisit the content.

So to all the pixel-obsessed out there, go Flash or go home…your time in XHTML is almost up.