Say what?

July 20th, 2004

Everyone is talking “web standards” these days. It is not a new topic – anymore. I first heard about web standards about two and a half years ago when I attended Web Design World in Seattle. Zeldman was the keynote speaker. Yes, that Zeldman. Long story short, his presentation on the topic of web standards, forward compatibility and responsible web development started me on a path of discovery, as a web professional, which has taken me to the level I am now. It changed my professional life. Standards are as much a part of my every day existence as a web professional than anything else I do.

Anyone who has heard or read this topic knows the key points. Heck, even my brothers who read this blog for fun (that is, to make fun of me) joke that, “If your site isn’t CSS, then it is no good.” We all know the benefits of web standards. It makes sense.

Recently, I was researching translation services on the web. AltaVista (http://babelfish.altavista.com/) has a pretty robust translation service, as does the all-powerful, Google (http://www.google.com/language_tools). These sites take any URL and then translate it into a different language — in real time. Well, I discovered that a site built with web standards, pure CSS, and well formed mark-up is almost 100% capable of being translated. We are talking navigation, links and copy. In essence, because the site is based on XHTML, it can be manipulated in many ways.

For example, here is a link to mattklawitter.com in German thanks to Google.com translation. Try it out. See how my navigation, text and copy is all translated. This allows for a German-speaker to get German navigation, along with German text. This is all possible because my site is completely web-standards based, and is driven by a separation of content (XHTML) and presentation (CSS). Now, you can argue the accuracy of the translation, but this, to me, is a perfect example of forward compatibility. Some day this will be the norm for all sites, and here is a real world example of why.

mattklawitter.com in French
mattklawitter.com in Spanish
mattklawitter.com in Italian
mattklawitter.com in Portuguese

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