Why Web Standards Matter

Using standards-based industry best-practices on your site gives it maximum flexibility and maximum market penetration; your site will render correctly across browsers and platforms, as well as any additional media you want.

Establishing Web Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the group that establishes the standards for web pages—rules for the syntax of the code, rules for how the site should be structured, rules for how heading tags should be used...

There are a lot of rules.

Their primary focus is establishing standards for separating content from style; this text you’re reading is the content, typed into a Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) page; the styling of the text—it’s size, color and font—and all of the other non-content elements on this page—the layout, background colors and graphics and the borders on this page, for instance—are styled via a separate text file called a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS).

Why CSS Matters

Changes made to the CSS are rendered globally throughout the site, making site management much easier. Design updates—even total site redesigns—become a simple matter of editing the style sheet; the content and the HTML, remains the same.

Creating standards-based sites also allows styling for different media, rendering the same content in a wide variety of devices and situations, including

screen
print
aural
Braille
TV
handhelds
projector
TTY

NextDesign is currently styled for screen—what you see on your computer's monitor—and print. You'll see the printable version by either printing the page or going to File>Print Preview.

The W3C has very firm ideas of how HTML and CSS should work. Their online validation process is a means of testing your pages against their standards, checking your code’s structure and syntax.

How Browsers See Web Pages

To start, a good web designer places a notation called a Doctype Declaration at the top of his page, technically, before the beginning of the page, something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1 /DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

This tells the web browser what sort of page it’s looking at, what “language” the page uses to render the content and the style. Without this note, the browser goes into “quirks” mode, attempting to render the page as best it can—never the best of all possible solutions. A good designer tells the browser how to render his pages; he doesn't leave it up to something justifiably called quirky.

But not everyone validates their web sites. We do and we’ll tell you why.

Compatibility with Everyone

Using the W3C’s validation process protects the designer—and his clients—from the kinds of quirky behavior we associate with poor web design. Additionally, hewing to these standards gives the designer a bit of a cushion. By following the guidelines and validating their pages, the designer’s sites have a better chance of rendering correctly in whatever technology future browsers may bring to bear.

But, validation is no substitute for testing in other browsers and platforms.

Good web designers will test their websites for cross-browser compatibility; we test ours in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and Firefox. We also check for cross-platform compatibility with a few friend's Apple computers to see how our pages are rendering.

Many designers don’t do this. They use whatever their default browser may be, with no thought as to what the idiosyncrasies of other browsers or platforms might be or what those quirks will do to their pages. You’ve seen these sites; the text runs off the side of the screen or runs underneath a graphic; designs that make no sense; in short, those pages are a mess.

Search Engines Like It

Search engines don’t like finding errors. If they have trouble parsing your pages, they may not get to your carefully chosen keywords, won’t be able to find all those tightly focused meta tags. Your site will be crippled on any search engine results page. This is not good.

A well designed website creates a clear channel, a road map, for search engines, so they know to go exactly where you want them to go and see exactly what you want them to see.

Professionalism

We are professional website developers. We make websites for people and charge them money for our services. Our primary obligation to our web clients is to prepare the best possible sites money can buy.

One way we prove this is by way of validation. It is an independent means of determining how well we have done our jobs.

Using Web Standards Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

Validation is an independent means of determining one aspect of the quality of a website’s design. While the W3C’s validation doesn't solve all web pages problems, it will prevent anything unexpected from happening in user’s browsers and helps to “future-proof” the site.

If your designer doesn't do these things, contact us today for a free consultation.