Web Standards for Business
Introduction 简介
This article highlights the benefits of using Web standards for business sites (Internet, intranet and extranet sites). It is aimed at stakeholders from the marketing, communication and IT departments.
这篇文章高度概括了商业站点（互联网、内联网和其他的网络）使用Web标准的益处。它的目标读者是从事于市场，通讯和IT部门的相关人士。
Benefits of Web Standards Web标准的益处
The benefits of Web standards is a topic that has been covered extensively, notably on the Web Standards Project and Netscape DevEdge's Strategy Central. Within the scope of this article, we will address the following benefits that particularly apply to us:
Web标准的益处在Web Standards Project和Netscape DevEdge's Strategy Central是一个被广泛的关注的话题。在这篇文章中，我们将阐述应用标准的显著的益处：
· the separation of content and presentation
· 内容和表现的分离
· the independence from Web browsers
· 独立于浏览器
· the quality and simplicity of the underlying HTML code
· 优化HTML的代码（不太妥当）
· the independence from proprietary lock-in
· （？）
Benefits of Web Standards for Business Sites
商业站点使用Web标准的益处
Quite often, a company needs to manage several kinds of Web sites — usually an external Web site (Internet), one or several internal sites (intranet) and sometimes, B2B sites (extranet). Within each of these Web domains, individual sites can be very different depending on their function and purpose. For example, it is common to see combinations of corporate sites, marketing, customer support, portals, knowledge bases, forums and online applications. In large international corporations, one can count hundreds, if not thousands, of sites — often managed by different teams. These teams deal with the following issues:
通常，一个公司需要管理好几种Web站点：一个外部网，一个或几个内部网，有时候还有B2B站点。在这些WEB域中，个别的站点非常特别因为它们有特别的功能和目的。例如，合并公司的市场，客户服务，门户，知识库，论坛和在线的应用系统到一个站点中是一个很普遍的做法。一个大的跨国公司的站点可能有成百上千个子站点，它们由不同的团队管理。这些站点处理下面的事情：
· corporate style guide (consistency in image and branding)
· 公司形象指导（与形象和商标紧密结合在一起）
· content management (creation, publication, maintenance)
· 内容管理（创作，发布，维护）
· design and development (methods, tools, in-house team work and/or agency management)
· 设计和发展（方法，工具，内部团队或代理管理）
· information technology (support, technologies, infrastructure)
· 信息技术（支持，技术，基础结构）
All companies are organized differently; in one company, the Webmaster role might be attached to the marketing/communication department; in another, the same role might be managed by the Information Technology (IT) department. Therefore, we will endeavour to focus on the benefits of Web standards in relation to the above issues rather than to a specific organizational role.
所有的公司都是按照不同的方式组织的；在一个公司中WEB管理员的角色可能由市场或者通讯部门承担；在另一个公司中同样的角色可能由IT部门承担。因此，我们将关注和上面的事情能够有关的WEB标准而不是针对一个特别组织的角色。
Corporate style guide: managing the consistency of brands and image
公司形象指导：管理商标和形象的结合
Any company wishing to maintain a consistent image has some guidelines that govern the expression of its corporate identity through all of its communication channels, whether internal or external. Hence, these guidelines must also apply to a company's Web sites. Such guidelines which affect Web sites pose two main challenges: their application to all sites; and their maintenance on an ongoing basis.
所有希望维持一个一致形象的公司都有一些指导方针来管理公司在所有交流通道上的统一的表达，不管是对内还是对外。因此，这些指导方针也必须应用于公司的WEB站点。这些指导方针影响了WEB站点姿态的两个主要挑战：它们应用于所有站点的应用软件；和程序基础上面的维护。
A company that has made a decision to adopt a non-standards based Web design can be contented with a style guide comprising purely graphical rules (typography, colors, layout), or provide HTML templates for each type of pages. Specifying only guidelines for graphical elements is a sure way to end up with a plethora of Web sites, each with different behaviors, code base, and other characteristics. Providing templates has the advantage of reducing errors, but this often forces the company to limit the use of Web editing tools to the product with which the templates have been created. If a team or an individual within the company uses a different tool, it may break the templates if this authoring tool does not handle the code in the same manner. It is possible to produce more restrictive templates to reduce errors, but since the templates cater for both content and presentation, it soon becomes difficult, if not impossible, for designers who enforce the company guidelines to produce templates for every situation; furthermore, it becomes a problem to maintain them on an ongoing basis. Without stringent control from those who enforce the guidelines and the goodwill of site owners, this workflow shows its limitations very quickly.
一个已经决定采用非标准的WEB设计的公司可能满足于使用纯粹由图画规则组成的一定的风格规范，或者提供一个HTML的模板给每一个页面。过多的站点采用了这种稳当的给每一个UI元素指定标准的方式，每个都有不同的动作，基础的编码以及其他的特征。提供模板有减少错误的优势，但是这却限制了公司只能使用创建模板使用的WEB编辑工具。如果团队或者公司使用了不同于模板的工具，并且它不能以相同的方式操作代码，那么它将会破坏模板。为了减少错误创作出更过的限制性的模板也是可能的，但是模板是需要迎合内容和表现，这对于执行公司标准来为每一种情况创作模板的设计师来讲也许是很困难的；而且，在不断进行的基础上面维护它们是个难题。如果没有对于执行指导方针的人员的严厉控制和站点所有者的善意（搞不懂，什么意思啊？），这种工作方式很快就显示了它的局限性。
Web standards greatly ease the production and maintenance of corporate style guides. At first glance, creating the guidelines using Web standards seem to require more effort; however, we shall see that these guidelines reduce both the subsequent workload and risks of errors. Style guides based on Web standards will require some consideration on two levels: meaningful structure of the content and the presentation.
WEB标准极大地简化了创作和维护公司形象规范的工作量。一开始，使用WEB标准来创建符合指导方针的作品似乎需要更多的努力；然而，我们将在以后看到这种方式减少了后期的工作量和犯错误的风险。基于WEB标准的风格规范需要考虑到两个层次：内容和表现。
· Content structure: what content is managed on each site? Which content components, such as corporate boilerplates and logos, will be beneficial to standardize on a global level, e.g. because they are published on several sites? Which components exist in standard corporate publications such as press releases and newsletters? This applies to the definition of guidelines for Web authors (for mark-up and code) and guidelines for content managers (content structure and writing).
· 内容结构：在每个站点上面都管理什么内容呢？就像公司的样板文件和标识这样的内容部件会在全局上受益于标准化吗？这些取决于指导方针对于WEB编写者和内容管理者的定义。
· Presentation: the "look & feel" of the sites. This applies to the creation of relevant Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
· 表现：站点的“看起来像什么和给人的感觉”。这取决于相应的样式表文件。
We can immediately see that this separation of content from presentation draws a distinction between two territories: content management and image/brand management, which are now handled separately instead of being closely intertwined within the templates. The managers of the corporate image and brand can now enforce the standard look and feel in a much easier way by using the stylesheets, since this is now independent of the content. If the guidelines have been well-designed, it will be possible to modify the presentation by a simple modification within the style definitions without touching the content — imagine the benefit of being able to apply a site-wide style modification by changing a single file! Likewise, adding a new site to existing guidelines can be achieved more quickly by adding definitions for new content components, and if necessary, the relevant style descriptions.
我们立即会看到内容和表现的分离在两个地方导致了区别：内容的管理和图像和商标的管理。它们现在被分离而不是在模板上紧密地结合在一起。公司图像和商标的管理者现在可以使用样式表这种更简单的方式来统一站点的显示和给人的感觉，这和内容是分离的。如果指导方针已经设计好的话，那么可能需要修改表现，只是修改样式定义而不需要改变内容。想想这样的好处吧，我们只需要修改一个文件就能改变整个站点！同样地，在现有的指导方针下面添加一个新的站点可以很快地完成，只要在新的内容部件上面添加样式定义就可以了，如果需要的话，我们可以添加相关的样式表述。
This method still requires good team work from all parties involved. However, it is less demanding in the long run as it is more flexible and better accomodated to each member's responsibilities.
这种方法在有关的各个部分仍然需要好的团队工作。然而，它的更好的灵活性和对于成员责任的适应性使团队不至于在长期的运行中过分费力。
Content management: creation and publication
内容管理：创建和发布
Thanks to content definitions within the new Web standards-compliant guidelines, content managers can now focus entirely on creating and disseminating content both inside and outside the company, without having to be concerned with presentation differences between these sites.
Web standards allow a company to manage its contents in a meaningful and structured manner that can be adapted to its own corporate vocabulary. Presentation is handled separately with the use of style sheets. These concepts of meaningful content and style sheets are not immediately obvious, but are neither fundamentally different nor more complex than the concept of styles within Microsoft Word. In most cases, a simple XHTML WYSIWYG editor is enough to do the job, or an XML-based content management system tailored to company-specific content at a more involved level. For example, a company may want to standardize the structure of a press release by defining meaningful elements such as title, headline, location, date, body and contact names.
An immediate benefit is that the content is now stored in a neutral and open format. This content will remain available for a longer period of time than if it were stored in a proprietary format, or if it were mixed with presentational elements, thereby risking obsolescence as soon as those elements are outdated. The most important benefit is the independence between the corporate content and its publication channels. Content that does not depend on presentation can be more easily disseminated through the various communications channels of a company. A press release created according to a common corporate standard will be easily published on its external Web site, its intranet portal, a mailing list, or an RSS news feed. It becomes truly possible to centralize content and reduce or eliminate duplicates without being limited by the medium of communication. Quite the contrary, by adopting Web standards, a company opens itself to a new breadth of existing media and emerging technologies that are based on these standards.
The browser war is dead, vive the browser war!
Since we are on the topic, what's the story with Web browsers? In the past, a more or less opportunistic ignorance of Web standards has led to the harmful growth of proprietary HTML during the "browser war" between Microsoft and Netscape. For years, these divergences have imposed a costly burden on companies that were forced to either support and test several proprietary environments, or to face legitimate frustration from the part of their potential audience using a browser they chose not to support — if not both at the same time!
The introduction of visual editors such as Dreamweaver or GoLive has reduced the problem, but only by hiding it. Companies that ignore Web standards continue to be exposed to these risks and have become confounded by the need to support several browsers on their Internet sites but only one on their intranet, in the hope of simplifying the problem. Unfortunately, the consequences of such a choice are largely ignored by most of those companies.
Firstly, the company is forced to maintain different guidelines between their Internet, intranet and extranet sites. The need to maintain a consistent image between all those sites then increases the costs and delays, especially in the case of corporate changes (reorganizations, mergers, partnerships) where the Web is expected, ironically, to ease and speed things up!
Secondly, the IT department usually thinks that the choice of a particular browser on the intranet shields them from a lot of problems. From the IT director’s perspective, it is logically necessary to limit the number of supported software to a strict minimum. However, the decision to employ a single browser, especially in an environment which nurtures a mono-culture amongst the developers, can lock a company into proprietary technology, a move that is dangerous and undesirable.
Indeed, this disregards the fact that the company extends further than the theoretical comfort of its standard computing operating environment. As telecommuting becomes more common, work is increasingly done on the home computer, customers and clients are beginning to request access to the intranet knowledge base, mobile personnel need universal access to the intranet anytime, from anywhere — not only from the corporate PC. I have two anecdotes to illustrate this point: once, I was asked to demonstrate an intranet site to a board member, but this site did not render on my computer (a Mac); on another occasion, I was called for help because of a server failure while I was attending a conference, hence I needed urgent access to my emails — this proved to be impossible from the conference cybercafé because it was equipped with … iMacs. In both cases, the problem was not with the browsers available on Mac OS, but because the propriety code used on these two sites have only been tested with one version of a single browser for Windows.
Furthermore, those who think that the browser war is over — only Internet Explorer for Windows counts — are making a big mistake. The supremacy of one browser is not absolute (as shown by the amazingly fast take-off of Safari as a replacement of Internet Explorer on the Mac), nor assured; Web standards put all browser developers on the same level and we have never seen so many alternative browsers competing to grab browser shares from Microsoft. And the observation of new-generation cellular phones with embedded browsers (such as Opera) and their market trends — for every PC, four phones are sold — shows where the next browser war will be.
Web standards are non-proprietary and developed independently of browsers (I should say user agents), and producers of software for the Web can no longer ignore them. By using Web standards, Web designers no longer have to have to cater for so many browsers in order to design sites that are accessible with current and future user agents. The corporate communications and marketing departments will be able to create a consistent style guide based on a common corporate vocabulary and a few style sheets to cover all their internal and external sites. The IT director will be able to continue to support one browser within the intranet only to limit his/her costs, and everyone — personnnel, clients or partners — will be able to use their browser of choice, as long as it is standards-compliant.
Quality of the code
Maintainability
Code maintenance of a company's Web site is a well-known issue for Webmasters and IT directors. In a more mature domain such as software development, the maintainability of code — the measure of ease and time required to maintain it — is a critical factor for success or failure. On the Web, where more people are involved and in more diverse ways that software development, communication between players' different responsibilities (graphic design, programming, integration, content) are even more complex when their individual contributions end up within the same HTML pages. The regular turnover of staff is also an issue when previous developers have used personal, proprietary or undocumented methods. When a company needs to undergo a complete re-vamp of its Web sites, it has to juggle between two extremes: absolutely nothing, due to the lack of resources (how many intranets are full of outdated sites because of this?); or starting again from scratch for the nth time (we will avoid tackling the notion of return on investment or budget slippages on intranet projects).
Languages that are part of Web standards improve code maintenance thanks to:
· their standardization, which implies a unique specification and public documentation
· their validation by publicly available tools (of which most are free)
Validation tools (such as the HTML validator and the CSS validator) are invaluable to developers, who can use them to learn about the standards more quickly, and at the same time, improve the quality of their code. Additionally, a client can use these to check the conformance of a site delivered by an internal or external supplier. Such tools contribute a great deal in decreasing the development and maintenance costs of Web sites whilst improving their quality.
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
Modularity
Code modularity is encouraged by the ability to use separate files to store application code (ECMAScript), style sheets (CSS), as well as having a separate place for the structured content once it has been detached from the presentation. The code can have a layout that is logical and easy-to-read, which is not the case when using HTML tables. Modularization allows multi-disciplinary teams to work better with simpler processes, where each group can achieve their goals without intervening with the responsibilities of another group. By better allowing code re-use, modularization helps to encourage best practices and speeds up the training process.
Furthermore, modular code is more concise and therefore has direct advantage in the case of search engines which index only a site's content. When the content is presented in a simple, semantically meaningful form, a search engine will have less work to do and thus achieve a better result in the indexing process. As search engines play a key role — especially in a corporate intranet, this improvement will not go unnoticed. Combined with well-organized content and hyperlinks, it is the best way to improve a site's ranking on Internet search engines.
Independence
Standards bodies ensure that standards remain open, with publicly documented specifications, and without license and copyright restrictions. They also have the role of maintaining these standards according to users' evolving needs. Web standards, like any industry standard, support the development of conforming tools. In this way, they are fundamentally different from proprietary standards which are closed, extendable only according to the business interests of the owners of those standards, and can be exploited only by proprietary tools whose availability in the long term is never guaranteed.
By using standards, a company can ensure that its content and applications remain independent from possible lock-ins by suppliers, and can be maintained in the long term according to its own objectives.
Conclusion
Web standards are the cornerstone and the future of the Web; considering the advantages they bring and the current trend in the evolution of browsers, all companies will come to them eventually. The adoption of Web standards in a company may require varying degrees of change depending on how well-prepared it is, its technological flexibility, the number of sites it has, the quality and quantity of existing content and software applications; this process must be studied and adapted to each case. As there is no urgency for most companies to employ Web standards, it is up to each company to consider the opportunity to do so each time it re-vamps its sites. This can be a good, gradual way to surmount the learning curve whilst getting the most from these new methods — by reducing the risk of errors and negotiating the natural resistance to change, with a sound knowledge of what benefits one can glean from Web standards.
For more information on Web standards, numerous free resources are available on the the Web. Here is a non-exhaustive selection:
· The Web Standard Project provides news, information and links to resources
· The W
· Strategy Central from Netscape DevEdge has case studies, presentation and articles on how to adopt Web standards
· Why Tables for Layout is Stupid is an excellent presentation comparing old and new design methods
François Nonnenmacher is the Corporate Webmaster of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and the author of padawan.info.
Translation from French by Stephanie Troeth.
原文地址：http://webstandards.org/learn/reference/web_standards_for_business.html
注:关于stakeholder这个词的意思,下面是我查到的说法,贴出来供大家参考:
我正在看一本项目管理的书，里面提到stakeholder分为5类,分别是：Project manager,Customer,Performing organization,Project team members,Sponsors .我想问一下Customer和Performing organization有什么区别
stakeholder这个单词在需求分析中是什么意思？？？？
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一般翻译成涉众，RUP中定义为“会受到系统结果重大影响的个人。”
可以理解成广义的系统用户。
我的理解是这样的：一般系统分析时，大部分集中于关注直接使用系统的人，即用户(User)。而在需求分析时，将受到系统结果重大影响的人或组织考虑在内，可以增加系统需求的稳定性以及最终产品的质量。
举例说，一个医院管理系统，患者的家属不是“用户”，但如果你在需求分析中将患者的家属作为“涉众”考虑在内，对如何做可以更好的提高他们的满意程度（如提高用药透明度/减少治病的环节）作为一个重要的维度作为考量，则这个系统虽然不会被他们直接使用，但该系统所支持的医院的服务质量将会大大的提高。在这种情况下“患者的家属”就是一个典型的涉众了。
说得不一定对，供你参考。
sealw 我比较喜欢“风险承担者”的译法
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因为承担风险，所以系统的开发与他们的获利或损失相关。比如说项目的投资人。又比如只有项目成功才能拿到最后一笔费用的开发者。获利和损失不仅包含财务上的，也许还有名誉上的，地位上的。也许不管项目成功或失败，开发者都能拿到同样的钱，但是失败对开发者仍然意味着损失。他们没有得到成就感，他们觉得浪费了时间。
请考虑“神五”项目，您可以列出许许多多的风险承担者
在团队协作类别中有四项实践－－stakeholder的积极参与，和他人一起建模，公开展示模型，和集体所有制。stakeholder的积极参与对你的成功至关重要，因为你正是为了这些project stakeholder开发系统，正是为了了解和实现他们的需求。换言之，你需要和你的甲方们密切合作，这就自然的想到了和他人一起建模－－这个“他人”也包括你的stakeholder。当你的建模工作有多人参加时（至少一个project stakeholder和一个除你之外的开发人员），你就需要和众人共同协作，相互促进，取长补短。