What are web standards?
"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. 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. Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market."
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The web standards
What are the benefits of using web standards
A site that has been built to web standards generally will be:
Using web standards - Step 1: use the correct doctype
"Many developers still don't realize that newer browsers look for a DOCTYPE at the top of each page, and will change the way they behave in response to it. Without the correct DOCTYPE, browsers can take your standards-compliant page and render it all wrong."
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Using web standards - Step 2: validate your code
"Validators check the syntax of your HTML and CSS to make sure it is correct, and let you know about any errors or ambiguities. It's up to you to figure out how to fix the errors, but usually the mistakes are fairly obvious."
Using web standards - Step 3: move presentation elements and attributes out of your markup
The ultimate aim for a website is to separate presentation (colours, fonts, layout, positioning) from content. This is achieved using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
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