A (Very) Brief Introduction to Web Standards

Last week WATBlog featured an interesting post asking whether you would wait for more than 4 seconds for a site to load. Though we didn’t specifically get into it site load times and its display and layout in general are all part of the idea having standardised web development and design practices. This idea is what we find going about as Valid Code, and Web Standards in discussions and articles about a better web ecosystem.

What are Web Standards?

Web Standards are essentially recommendations of the W3C. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. A W3C Recommendation is a specification or set of guidelines that, after extensive consensus-building, has received the endorsement of W3C Members and the Director. W3C recommends the wide deployment of its recommendations. So for whatever Web Standards stand, they are certainly not bound rules to follow while building your cherished website.

Nevertheless, they relate to best practices followed in building websites. These practices when followed renders a website seamlessly across access platforms and deliver the content regardless of who is accessing the site (able/disabled/Dial Up/Broadband/etc. ). Besides the standards also look at decreasing cost and time involved in web development and maintenance. Web Standards as a term talks about:

• Valid HTML/XHTML code
• Semantically correct code
• Separation of content (HTML/XHTML), presentation (CSS) and interaction (JavaScript)

Now, a standards compliant site goes beyond fast loading and good looks. It has its advantages beyond a lot of obvious points. Some of these are:

Search Engine Optimization: Google is known to be partially in indexing standards compliant websites. And the effect of a good Google ranking has been ranted often for me to add tot he clutter now.

Scalability and Access: The browser wars have just begun with each taking a big chunk of loyal users with them. A business can’t afford to cater to just one of these big chunks, unless you are a browser make of course (sometimes not even then). Your customers would want to access your site from anywhere, IE, Safari, Opera Mini, iPhone. Standards make sure that you look the same to every eye.

Marketing and Buzz: I have found a lot of new websites and tools through CSS galerries where their trendy websites were listed for excellence in design. With the rise of the blog republic you are looking at more people citing examples of good work. The buzz can be as surprising and the link love as mesmerising as the ..well can’t find anything analogous to it right now really.

Alright, I am not a designer, but I have often been intrigued by good web designs and discussions on standards and validation is something I often come across in my browse time. And when I see a lot of popular sites, (government ones the most) fill up my window with trashy tables of HTML, it strikes me hard that despite having the advantage of hindsight we don’t adopt better site development and maintenance measures. Hopefully, we can cover standards and good design practices more often here with some expert advice which perhaps will also push better design practices. OR at least a checklist of sorts.