National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Goddard Space Flight Center
Search:
Web Standards to the rescue. One NASA Look and Feel CSS TEMPLATES
Why Web Standards?
Money Talks
The average Web Standards html document has a 50% smaller byte size than the typical traditional html document. A 20-30k savings might not seem like a lot to get excited over, especially taking into account highspeed internet access, but these smaller pages benefit more than the user who has to download them. Where the NASA portal is concerned, they get millions of hits daily, and a good portion of their bandwidth usage is from downloading the html documents themselves. So let us assume the portal uses one million dollars a year just in html downloads, the reduction of 50% page size would reduce the cost by 50% for $0.5M savings. Along with all the other benefits from Web Standards, this one is sure to make the financial office happy.
For a web site that doesn't get a lot of hits this doesn't seem like a big deal. But collectively, this is a huge deal. Each NASA facility is paying for bandwidth that their web sites use. Although I don't know how many web sites each facility supports, it is sure to be many hundreds. One brick isn't very heavy, but get enough and you need mechanical help (I actually got that in a fortune cookie).
Traditional web sites mean traditional fixes
Back in the late 1990's when it seemed like web budgets grew on trees, updating and re-developing sites every year seemed like a great idea. Things have changed. Today, our budgets are much lower, and we can no longer afford to continue with the, as Jeffrey Zeldman puts it, "Build now Pay later" philosophy. A Web Standards development model moves us in the right direction to lower costs of re-development and maintenance.
Since we are serving one document to all devices, our development time is cut drastically when we need to update our website, or even redesign it. No longer will we need to make the same changes on multiple versions of a web site, and much lower development costs are now possible. The money saved can be put towards the much needed content management and information architecture that most of our web sites lack. Saving in production and maintenance time not only benefits us financially; it gives us extra time to grow professionaly in other web diciplines we previously were unable to learn.
It's time to talk about the four-letter-word: NN4.x.
Why Web Standards?
NASA Fact
Insert a NASA fact here. Feel free to use a server side include or a back-end rotater.
- NASA Official: Bob Peirce
- Curator: Karen Smale
- Page Last Updated: (none)