The heart of the matter
the comparison
savings & accessibility
- The two designs are very different
- Savings of time and weight is difficult to determine per page download
- Overall savings through less stress on servers, via HTTP requests
- Cached CSS sheets means quicker display versus table-based designs
| HTML Site | XHTML Site | |
|---|---|---|
| HTML Size | 17,000 bytes. | 11,000 bytes. |
| Number & Size of Images Cached | 24 images at 70,000 bytes. All 24 in HTML. | 43 images at 62,000 bytes. 1 in HTML, 42 in CSS. |
| Accessibility Highlights | Meets 508 compliance for images (alt tags). | Yes. Added access keys and tab indexing as well as "skip to content." Semantic markup allows for more accessibility, beyond 508 compliance. |
| Meets Web Standards | No. | Yes. Content, Presentation, & Behavior are separated. |
| Interoperability | Uncertain. | Style sheets designed for print, handheld (forthcoming), screen, and projection. |
| Forward Compatibility | No, HTML is being phased out. | Yes, meets standards to ensure forward compatibility. |
| CSS | No. | Yes, several style sheets associated with pages. |
| Editing Costs | Time consuming edits. Needs to changing all deprecated elements being phased out with HTML. | Edits are very simple. Changes to presentation are universally done in style sheets or script documents. |
| Tables | Mainly used for presentation. | Tables used only to display tabular data with table summaries, table headings, and captions. |
| Documents & Images Summary | Total HTML Images: 24 | Total HTML Images: 1 Total CSS Images: 8 Total Scripts: 1 Total CSS imports: 1 |
| HTTP Requests | Total HTTP Requests: 25 | Total HTTP Requests: 12 |