What are web standards?
Web standards refer to standards for creating website's that are internationally agreed on as the best practices. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is the international governing body that oversees the development of web standards such as XHTML and CSS.
There could be no filmmaking without industry-wide agreement on frame rates, lenses, and audio recording techniques. Likewise, the continued health of web design and development depends on the adoption of web standards. Without these standards, there can be no true usability and no coherent approach to design.
What are the advantages of using web standards?
- Lower bandwidth costs
- Separating the content from the presentation using CSS and implementing clean semantic XHTML can reduce the weight of a website by 25% to 50%. Whether your website is large or small, the smaller your files, the lower your bandwidth, and the less likely you are to run afoul of your hosting company's file transfer costs.
- Reduced maintenance costs
- Well-written, standards-compliant code is concise, clean and clear. For the average web author, this means a great deal of time can be saved in the process of updating or altering content.
- Increased accessibility
- Allowing the web to be used by people with disabilities and enabling web pages to be understood by people using browsers other than the usual ones including:
- Voice browsers that read web pages aloud to people with sight impairments
- Braille browsers that translate text into Braille
- Hand-held browsers with very little monitor space
- Teletext displays
- Other unusual output devices.
- Faster download times
- As mentioned above: separating the content from the presentation using CSS and implementing clean semantic XHTML can reduce the weight of a website by 25% to 50%. Reduced file sizes means faster downloading times improving the user experience as webpages load more quickly.
- Search engine friendly
- A standards-compliant website achieves greater visibility in web searches because the structural information present in compliant documents makes it easy for search engines to access and evaluate the information in those documents. Improved search engine visibility results in more traffic.
- Stability
- Because a website may go through several teams of designers during its lifetime, it is important that those people are able to comprehend the markup (XHTML) and to edit it easily. Web standards offer a set of rules that every web developer can follow, understand, and become familiar with: When one developer designs a website to the standards, another will be able to pick up where the former left off.
- Future-proof
- Using valid, standards-compliant markup (XHTML) ensures that data will still be re-usable for a long time, as specifications on how to parse the standard formats are well documented and here to stay.