Clarity and conciseness

Sites based on the so-called "old-school" design methods use a lot of intricate tables and transparent images whose code is mixed with the actual content, and thus are transmitted with each page. On a standards-compliant Web site, the presentation can be sent once, using one or more style sheets that are cached by the browser. Separated from the presentation, the mark-up of the content is more concise. The volume of data transmitted over the network is therefore smaller, which has two immediate advantages: pages render faster on browsers; and the bandwidth requirement (a very costly item) is lowered. Conciseness also has a positive impact on the quality of the code; it becomes easier to maintain.

The actual savings will be different in each case; it depends, among other reasons, on the following:

- the level of optimization of the initial code. The less the initial site was optimized (in terms of file size vs. percentage of useful content), the more significant the savings will be.

- the type of traffic received. A site that receives 80% of the total traffic on its home page (the most common scenario on Internet sites and portals), the savings will be less than a site with more distributed traffic. This is because the presentation information (CSS) is only loaded once along with the first page. A company applying the same presentation to all its intranet sites would see a significant reduction in bandwidth and, consequently, in its network infrastructure costs. This will be of particular interest to the IT director, who is always under pressure to reduce costs!

In the case of ESPN (which recently adopted Web standards), the savings include 50% reduction of page weight to 50kb — with 40 M page views per day, this translates to a saving of 2 TB/day, 61 TB/month and 730 TB/year. Take your ISP contract, your Web statistics, and do the math.