I have recently been giving a presentation to various organizations titled: Machines First, Humans Second: Building Web Apps for Multiple User Agents

Next week I'll be speaking at the St. Mary's University's Bill Greehey School of Business.

One of my 'Considerations for Building for Machines First' is using cascading styles sheets (CSS) to separate styles from markup. To demonstrate a machine view (user agents, browsers, search engine technologies), I disable styles on a well written website along side of one that isn't.

Through this comparison, I am able to demonstrate the following:

Only content free from formatting can be easily repurposed

The use of font element or inline CSS fuses content and formatting together. We seperate content and style by using external style sheets. When you turn off the CSS on your Web site, you can see if your content is free from formatting and if it can be easily repurposed in a different page layout, should you want to redesign your Web site in the future.

Content is king

Are visitors attracted to your Web because of its quality content or because of its pretty layout? By turning off the CSS on your Web site, you have the opportunity to see what you are really offering your visitors - quality content!

Good markup is search engine-friendly

Search engines are blind - they don't see the pretty formatting on your site. By turning off the CSS on your Web site, you have the opportunity to see your Web site in a similar way to how search engines see it. Making sure your Web site works well with CSS turned off will make it easier for search engines to process your Web pages and will lead to a better search ranking.