Why are Web Standards Important?
Web Standards are a set of recommendations as set out by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) for producing valid and accessible web pages. The cornestones of web standards are:
- Valid code - HTML and CSS documents are used correctly and validate against the W3C specifications. The W3C XHTML and CSS badges you see on some sites, including this one, mean the site is build with valid code. Clicking on the badge will run the page through the W3C validator and tell you whether the page is valid or not.
- Semantically correct code - HTML tags are used to convey the structural meaning of the content they relate to. For example, the table tag is used only for tabular data, heading tags (h1, h2, etc) are used to indicate that a piece of content is a heading. This also means not having meaningless tags littered throughout the code and not using tags for their presentation, but instead, for their structural meaning.
- Accessibility - accessible documents are usable by the widest possible audiences, including users with visual impairments, cognitive disabilities, users of assistive devices such as screen readers as well as users of different devices such as PDAs, mobile phones, etc.
- Separation of content from presentation - HTML documents contain the content of a page, whilst all the presentational instructions are included in a separate CSS file.
There are many real benefits in developing web pages in accordance with web standards. Some of the main benefits are:
- Reduced page weight and bandwidth costs
- Reduced long-term development times
- Websites that don't discriminate
- Web pages that reach more people
This Web Standards information has been sourced from Glass Onion