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Web Standards

You may have seen words such as "W3c" or "web standards" or "CSS", but what exactly are they? These technologies which we call 'web standards' are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web" (webstandards.org/about).

Designing to web standards means websites and pages that are faster, more accessible, usable and perform better in search engines. They are also easy to revise and modify, saving money in future modifications.

Ask five designers what web standards are and you will probably get five answers. But most agree that they are based on the following:

Valid code, whether html or xhtml (or others)

The standards outlined for the code that makes a web page have been developed to acheive consistancy. It's easy to check your code at validator.w3.org. Make sure you use the correct DOCTYPE when you try and validate your code.

Semantically Correct Code

We mentioned before that being semantic means that the (x)html in the web page describes only content, not presentation. In particular this means structured organization of h1/h2 etc tags and only using tables for tablular data, not to layout a web page.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Closely related to having semantic code, is using cascading style sheets to control the look and layout of your web page. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents. (Source: www.w3.org/Style/CSS/). They exist parallel to the (x)html code and so let you completely seperate content (semantic code) form presentation (CSS). The result is pages that look very different but have the same core content.

The result is simply better pages, better by design.