You may have seen words such as “web standards” or “CSS“, but what exactly are they? “These technologies, which we call ìweb standards,î are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web” (source: webstandards.org/about/).
To help you understand where web standards came from, some history is helpful. Many web pages are actually designed for older browsers. Why? Browsers have continually evolved since the www started. New ones have appeared and old ones have disappeared (remember Netscape?). Another complicating factor is that different browser makers (like Microsoft) tend to have their browsers interpret html/xhtml in slightly different ways. This has lead to web designers having to design their websites to support older browsers rather than new ones. It’s often decided that the web page needs to appear properly to these “legacy” browsers.
Web standards put into place a common set of “rules” for all web browsers to use to show a web page. The main organization pushing these standards is the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), whose Director, Tim Berners-Lee has the distinction of actually inventing the world wide web in 1989.
Ask five designers what web standards are and you will get five answers. But most agree that they are based on the following:
- Valid code, whether html or xhtml (or others)
Earlier we used an example of building codes for construction. The standards outlined for the code that makes a web page have been developed to acheive consistancy. It’s easy to check your code at validator.w3.org. Make sure you use the correct DOCTYPE when you try and validate your code. This article at Compass Design described valid Joomla doctype. - Semantically Correct Code
We mentioned before that being semantic means that the (x)html in the web page describes only content, not presentation. In particular this means structured organization of h1/h2 etc tags and only using tables for tablular data, not to layout a web page. - Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Closely related to having semantic code, is using cascading style sheets to control the look and layout of your web page. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents. (Source: www.w3.org/Style/CSS/). They exist parallel to the (x)html code and so let you completely separate content (semantic code) from presentation (CSS). The best example of this is CSS Zen Garden, a site where the same semantic xhtml is shaped in different and unique ways with different CSS. The result is pages that look very different but have the same core content.
Kevin D Burt 