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Any long term readers of this blog, or visitors to My Web Design Business' Website, have most likely seen Me make reference to My work being both HTML 5 and CSS 3 Standards compliant. The odds are that unless you, yourself are also a Web Designer the question might have crossed your mind as to just why these details are important.
In this blog, I am going to attempt to explain the benefits of following these standards from both the viewpoint of the agency commissioning a Website project and that of the end user's interaction with said Website.
Lets take a look first at some of the benefits a Standards compliant website can do for a customer.
Consumers use many different devices in this modern age to access Websites, if they are accessing something from work the likelihood is that they are using a Windows based computer and perhaps the Internet Explorer Web Browser.
When getting home, or out in the field and needing to access theses same Websites the methods of accessing strongly increase. If one is lucky the end user is still going to be using a Windows based computer with Internet Explorer. However there is a very large and likely possibility that they are not.
Modern society accesses the Internet using a multitude of devices in large array of configurations, be it Windows, Android, iOS, OS X, Linux or any other of a multitude of operating systems, each comes with it own options as far as the Web Browser users.
The thing is though that no two Web Browsers may display a Website the same way, a detail that can result in the user having looked up a website on one access point and not being able to find the same information on a different device.
The solution to this is delivered by Web Designers having a collection of accepted rules, which are designed to try to level the field when it comes to getting information to the end user.
This Wikipedia article shows the history of the Web Browser and the development engines that run the majority of Browsers. Webkit is becoming a strong force and is supported by Chrome, Safari and Opera Browsers
From the developer’s side, standards become a very important detail in creating code that is easy to maintain and update as changes happen with a Website. The use of linked CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allow for a Web Master to change one aspect of code in one document which will in turn effect change in multiple pages of displayed content.
Standards also allow an organization that sees multiple users imputing information into a Website maintain a consistent look to the final product, as with properly commented areas, the content creators can simply import their information into a created template, save the document with a new name and hand off the document for uploading to the Web Master.
Can Websites work without being 100% Standard’s compliant ? the answer to that is Yes. In fact just last night I was running some sites through the Validation Engine provided by the W3C Consortium and found that there are Websites for Major corporations in Technology that actually return as using non-standard code. Should Standards be ignored? In My opinion as a Designer, the answer is No.
Standards are what keeps the World Wide Web clean, they allow for ease of design, ease of access, and in this day and age of Internet threats to privacy and security can be a line of defense in keeping the end user safe as the odds of malicious code in my opinion is increased when one is not using Industry standard coding practices.
In short, Standards are our friend.
