What’s the purpose of Web Standards?
“Web Standards” refers to a set of informal recommendations and formal technical specifications developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that define and describe the World Wide Web in its multiple aspects.
Today this term tends to be associated with a growing trend among informed Web professionals to promote the adoption and implementation of a set of best practices for design and construction of Web sites, focusing on usability and accessibility.
The advantages of a Web Standards-compliant site are:
simplified maintenance and development: use of structured, semantic code makes work easier for later developers.
assurance of compatibility and scalability: use of standard (X)HTML code eliminates any risk that your document will be unreadable by current and future Web browsers.
faster loading and rendering of your site: less (X)HTML code; smaller files, resulting in quicker loading; bandwidth savings; current Web browsers display pages that comply with standards much faster than if they contain invalid code.
simplified adaptation: one CSS style sheet can be used to make radical changes to the form of an entire site. Printing is optimized and content is adapted for alternative browsers, such as PDAs and cell phones, simply by specifying a different style sheet.
better visibility on search engines: the strict separation between presentation and content significantly improves your site’s visibility on search engines.
greater accessibility: with semantic (X)HTML code, screen readers and other alternative browsers can interpret Web pages more easily.
