About Me
Why Web Standards?
I've learned the web standards for some time and I feel pity for not being included in this "world" before. What a wonderful thing to be able to do things right. Imagine a perfect world where websites are seen by everyone without browser's compatibility problems, accessibility restrictions and where your website is easily found by search engines. These are just a few promises of using the web standards. I think you should appreciate this one:
Writing web pages in accordance with the standards shortens site development time and makes pages easier to maintain. Debugging and troubleshooting become easier, because the code follows a standard. No longer do you have to worry about the coding and maintenance for several versions of code that are supposed to accomplish the same presentation. One version of your site and that is it.
( The Web Standards Project - FAQ p4 )
Actually I'm still setting myself up to design and build perfect standards compliant websites, but I can ensure you that it's not so difficult like it seems to be. There are some keywords that can guide you in the beginning: W3C, XHTML, XML, CSS, DOM, Ecma International, Accessibility and Semantic Markup. If you find out more about them, or if you have already some knowledge in these areas you are in the right way. It's also important to be aware that:
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international industry consortium dedicated to "leading the Web to its full potential". It's led by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web. Founded in 1994, the W3C has more than 450 member organizations - including Microsoft, America Online (parent company of Netscape Communications), Apple Computer, Adobe, Macromedia, Sun Microsystems, and a variety of other hardware and software manufacturers, content providers, academic institutions, and telecommunications companies.
( The Web Standards Project - FAQ p211 )
The specifications, guidelines, software, and tools developed by these working groups are the result of a general consensus from companies and other organizations, which are truly recommended to make the Web a better place.
Besides The Web Standards Project and The World Wide Web Consortium, it is worth to have a look at The Web standards checklist of Max Design that is a really helpful guide. Actually, as we can see in this checklist, we need more than a "table-free site", or "valid code" to have a web standards compliant website. We must separate behaviour, content and presentation; guarantee the quality of code; offer accessibility for users and devices; assure basic usability and take care of some site management issues, for instance user friendly URLs.
I think I'm looking at the tip of the iceberg, but I'm enjoying despite all the hard work that I'm facing to be proficient in this field.
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