The Power Of Standards
Monday, February 25th, 2008The internet is changing.
In the good old days, websites were all there was. Blogs, content management systems, and YouTube didn’t exist. At this point in its development, the world wide web was simply a network of interconnected documents. This document linked to that document, and so you could follow the train from one document to the other.
Today however, things are different. The internet has changed to be much more dynamic and user driven. Anyone can post a video on YouTube, rate a site on Stumbleupon, or even edit a company document in Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The dynamic, social web is here. And with this new social web comes an increased reliance on standards.
Today as never before web developers are pushing the envelope of what websites can do. Huge social sites like Facebook and Myspace serve as meeting places where our societies can share information and people can connect. Games like World of Warcraft and Half Life 2 bring dreams to life in 3D virtual worlds, and the Blogosphere has revolutionalized traditional news reporting. As awesome as all these things are, however; the best truly is yet to come.
Up until now HTML and the languages that make up the World Wide Web have been very loose in their standards. Because HTML doesn’t show errors, it has been very easy for even unexperienced designers to get websites up quickly. However, that flexibility has come with a price. As every web designer knows, getting a website to look exactly the same in every major browser is no mean feat. Even worse, with an increase in mobile devices with internet access (phones, iPods, and PDA’s), the task of building a website that just works now mater when or how it is accessed has quickly gotten much harder.
And that is why standards are so important. In order to deal with the huge number of websites, web applications, and social networking platforms, web browsers are being forced to adopt stricter standards as to what they can display, and how they will display it. After all, everybody wants every website they visit to “Just Work”.
For web designers, and those considering having a new website designed this is something that you MUST take note of. Just because it looks nice now, doesn’t mean it will look the same a year, 6 months, or even 3 months from now.
Unless your website is built to follow the same standards that the web browser developers are following, you may soon find that your site doesn’t work quite as well as it once did. And if your site doesn’t work quite right, there is a high chance that your visitors will visit your competitor’s site that does.
Standards cannot and should not be ignored any longer. Designers, get your act together and design sites that validate. Companies, insist that your website, or at the very least any new site or re-design you commission, meets website standards. And if you think your website is ok, try using the Official W3C Website Validation Tool on your site or your competitor’s site. You may just be surprised at how many sites DON’T meet the standards.
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