Google Sponsored ad:
Enter the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). To make it easier for developers to make websites that render more consistently across browsers, this organization, consisting of an international groep of experts, set to work to define standards for essential web languages such as CSS, HTML and Javascript.
This reduced the countless hours spent in frustration by many web developers to make their sites render well across verious browsers. And while this, admittedly, can still be a problem, especially with older browsers like Internet Exporer 6, it is now much less of a difficulty. Also, browser vendors are more and more making their browsers work with web standards. So we have good times ahead.
Some good reasons to make your web site web standards compliant are:
- Decreased development time. We van control the entire design with external CSS sheets.
- Decreased maintenance time. We can make changes in the entire site by tweaking just a few lines of CSS
- Rendering more stable code. Web sites that adhere to web standards are likely to work well with older browsers. But they are far more likely to work in future browser platforms.
But the most important reason to make your web site standards compliant is findability or SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The reason is that standards compliant code is good code. That is: good code will be more meningful for the search engines to make sense of, resulting in a higher quality rating, that in turn results in a higher placing in the rankings. You will find a lot of interesting reading and further information on the site of Jeffrey Zeldman, who has been busy with web standards and web design in a big way.
