Last week we had a great guest speaker, Mr. John Allsopp, stop by our class . He came to discuss web technologies and developing and designing with web standards. You can check out his site here. In honor of his visit to speak to us, I thought I’d take a look at Web Standards and why they are so important to consider when designing for the web.
Web Standards are guidance created by the W3C designed to help ensure that everyone has access to the information being provided, and also making the web.
Complying with web standards can give your web pages greater visibility in web searches. The structural information present in documents that adhere to standards makes it easy for search engines to access and scan the information in those documents. Thus, they get indexed more accurately and potentially rank higher.
Standards are designed so that old browsers will still understand the structure of your documents. Even if they don’t recognize or understand some of the newer elements, they’ll still be able to display your site’s content. Even if you are using old versions of the standards, it will continue to work in new browsers, and data using new versions of the standards will “gracefully degrade” to produce an acceptable result in older browsers.
Finally, documents that comply with Web Standards can be easily converted to other formats. This allows for more versatile use of the information within documents on the web and simplified integration and migration to new systems.
