There are some advisable practices that allow you to obtain a more flexible and reasoned approach to developing a financial website. This approach to financial content is based on standards devised by organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These involve various concepts (that deal not only with money, loans and real estate), yet they all share the crucial idea of proper separation of presentation of financial data from structured content and from the behavior level of the user interface. These three levels are all potentially interconnected to the backend software running your financial website when they should not be. Modern, W3C standards advise the implementation of the three levels as follows, encompassing structured content, presentation, and behavior:
Structured Financial Content should involve valid HTML or XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) in order to mark up your content and forms (for example loan application forms). Such markup needs to be semantically built and entirely devoid of any presentation or behavior data.
Presentation of financial data should involve the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Style sheets contain all necessary presentation information for all your financial websites and applications. This presentation layer should never be incorporated directly in your CMS or application logic with the exception of references to the files, classes, and IDs.
Behavior: usually JavaScript (aka ECMAScript). Modern JavaScript has the ability to be implemented in an unobtrusive manner, using only external files and the W3C Document Object Model (DOM) instead of any kind of proprietary code. Moreover, it never contains any references to presentation of financial data directly, but instead gets and sets classes which point back to the CSS. While connected with the CMS or application layers of your money management software, no JavaScript should ever be inline or intermingled with this code directly.
