Benefits of Web Standards
What are web standards
Web Standards are technologies (e.g. HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, etc.) that are internationally agreed on as the best practices for creating and interpreting web pages.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) oversees the development of web standards. Special working groups, set up by the W3C, write recommendations that describe how a web page should be marked up (coded) with HTML, XHTML and CSS and how browsers should display that mark up. They then obtain consensus from organisations such as Microsoft and Mozilla that develop web browsers such as Explorer and Firefox. These recommendations are what the web standards are all about.
Benefits of web standards
Most if not all web developers have heard or know about web standards. Yet, only a minority make the effort to comply to them. The W3C develops these technologies (web standards) 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.
The benefits of using web standards for your company include:
- Higher visitor retention rates - web pages that comply to web standards are much faster to download and site users are much more likely to stay on your website if pages download quickly;
- Easier and cheaper maintenance - designing and building with these standards lowers the cost of site maintenance. With the use of CSS, it's easier to make site-wide changes - one CSS file is needed apply global changes to presentation and it's easier to code changes as there is less code on each page;
- Increased reach of your target audience - web standards compliant websites are accessible to more people as they can be viewed on most browsers, browser versions, internet devices and platforms;
- Current and future browsers compatibility - sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.
Why is invalid code a problem?
While web pages built with invalid code may currently display properly, browsers that are being built now and into the future will follow the W3C guidelines closely. This means that any invalid code today will render poorly, incorrectly or not at all tomorrow.
