This BIA site has been designed for the future. The site has been constructed using leading edge Web technology, and global Open Standards provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.
W3C Recommendations used in the construction of this site are:
The use of XML and related technologies provides the BIA with some significant advantages. For example, membership information is captured tagged up as what the data is (<member>, <address>, <email> <phoneno>), not what it should look like in a browser.
The use of the XSL transformation language (XSLT), allows the BIA to capture member information once, then transform it into any form required such as XHTML for display on the web, tab delimited form for import into Word Perfect, or any other form required by an application, all without modifying the original data.
The use of Cascading Style Sheets allows the formatting of web pages to be created and stored separately from the content of those web pages. Downstream modification of styling requires only a single change to the CSS file, not the individual web pages, significantly reducing the downstream maintainance of the site.
The web pages you are viewing have been either written directly in XHTML, or have been automatically generated by an XSLT process.
The entire BIA web site has been validated against Open Standards as provided by the W3C, and is certified to be both CSS and XHTML compliant.