Search Engine Optimization and CSS - Load Times and Accessibility
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1. Pages Load Faster
Web pages designed with CSS are much smaller in size than pages designed solely in HTML. Smaller pages load faster because there is less overall text to be rendered in a browser, and also less code for a search engine spider to trudge through.
Let’s take for example two web pages that were designed differently, but look identical to the human eye. One was designed completely in HTML, the other in CSS and XHTML. The pages have the same content, the same images, and the same elements. The HTML page is 39 kilobytes, while the web page designed with an external style sheet is only 8 kilobytes. By eliminating font, table, and other tags in the HTML, we saved 31 kilobytes in the page that utilizes CSS. Page load times for the HTML page are close to one minute with a 56.6K modem; whereas, the page with the style sheet loads in just a few seconds.
Overly heavy pages are not as effective in search marketing as light pages. Less HTML will improve how well the search engine can parse the page, and return it in the SERPs (search engine results pages) when a visitor makes a search engine query.
Search engine spiders are very simple animals, so to speak, and generally fairly standards-dependent. They need standards-compliant code in order to access all areas of a website. Since font tags are deprecated, it makes sense not to include them in your HTML, which will make for a smaller file.
2. Accommodates Accessibility
CSS is very friendly to accessibility readers. Not everyone views web pages in browsers like Internet Explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox. People who are visually impaired or have other disabilities use accessibility readers. Accessibility readers are tools that read code for the viewer and translates HTML into audio, extra large text, or other formats that just strips out all the html tags.
Content in pure HTML is not organized in such a way, referred to as the ‘code flow’, that if all the tags were removed, (as they would be if HTML is translated into audio or text), there would be no logic to the content, especially if the HTML was designed poorly or with a lot of tables, and the visitor could make little sense of the content.
“It is important to remember that accessibility tools can only partially check accessibility through automation. All accessibility tools scan the source code of a web page using interpretations of either the United States Rehabilitation Act Section 508 standards and/or the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG). Of the sixteen standards in Section 508, only seven standards can be partially evaluated automatically; similarly, of the combined 65 checkpoints in WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 through Priority 3, only nineteen can be partially evaluated automatically.” ***
Just as when writing an article in Word, I don’t always accept some grammar and spelling checks by the program, because these sometimes require human judgment to determine if corrections should be made.
If human judgment is required during scans of HTML with accessibility tools, then having to reorganize the content of the page, so that the code flow is in a logical order, will take quite a bit of time. Using CSS with HTML properly would ensure that stripping out HTML tags would be unnecessary, and eliminate the need to reorganize the content for readability.
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