What are Web Design Standards and why are they important to designing a Site?

Web Design Standards, if you or your company have ever worked with a Web Designer, you most likely have faced the conversation about what they are are why they are important to your Project's design.

So, just what are they and who created these standards in the first place? Well to answer those two questions lets look at the second question first.

Who created Web Standards ?

Web Standards were created and are overseen by a group called the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C for short).  The W3C routinely look over the ever developing code and browser development market, choosing what is officially supported in HTML and CSS language based on if 2 out of 3 of the major Browser Platforms support and display the code in a specific way.  The full explanation of the technologies that W3C have oversight on can be found at this link

http://www.w3.org/standards/

What are Web Standards and why are they important to a design?

Think of Web Standards much like you would creating programming for Televisions. Your end user could be using a Samsung, LG, Panasonic or any other brand name or off brand name Television to access your programming, as a Designer, or Content provider you want everybody who does access your content to see it the same way, which brings up to the main point about Standards

Since a image file is posted up using the same code on the back end of a Web Site, it no longer matters if your consumer is accessing things via Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS or any other platform, thanks to your site being coded and validated to meet the current standards it SHOULD look the same everywhere (unless being accessed on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which for the longest time did not support the recommended standards that Firefox, Chrome and predecessors like Netscape supported)