Why Web Standards Matters

Establishing Web Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the group that establishes the standards for web pages—rules for the syntax of the code, rules for how sites should be structured, rules for how heading tags should be used...

There are a lot of rules.

Their primary notion is the separation of content from style; this text you’re reading is the content, typed into a Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) page; the styling of the page—it’s layout, background colors and fonts—and every other elements on this page—are done via a separate text file called a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS).

Changes made to the styling in the style sheet are rendered globally throughout the site, making site management much easier for webmasters.

The W3C has very firm ideas of how HTML and CSS should work. Their online validation process is a means of testing your pages against their standards, checking your code’s structure and syntax.

How Browsers See Web Pages

To start, a good web designer places a notation at the top of his page, called a Doctype Declaration, before the beginning of the page, something like this:

“<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1 /DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">”

This tells the web browser what sort of page it’s looking at, what “language” the page uses to render the content and the style. Without this note, the browser goes into “quirks” mode, attempting to render the page as best it can—never the best of all possible solutions. A good designer tells the browser how to render his pages; he doesn’t leave it up to something justifiably called “quirky”.

But not everyone validates their web sites. We do and we’ll tell you why.

Compatibility with Everyone

Good web designers will test their websites for cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility; we test ours in the latest versions of:

Many designers don’t do this. They use whatever their default browser may be, with no thought as to what the idiosyncrasies of other browsers or platforms might be or what those quirks will do to their pages. You’ve seen these sites; the text runs off the side of the screen or runs underneath a graphic; designs that make no sense; in short, those pages are a mess.

But, validation is no substitute for testing in other browsers and platforms.

Using the W3C’s validation process protects the designer—and his clients—from the kinds of quirky behavior we associate with poor web design. Additionally, hewing to these standards gives the designer a bit of a cushion. By following the guidelines and validating their pages, the designer’s sites have a better chance of rendering correctly in whatever technology future browsers may bring to bear.

Search Engines Like It

Search engines don’t like finding errors. If they have trouble parsing your pages, they may not get to your carefully chosen keywords, won’t be able to find all those tightly focused meta tags. Your site will be crippled on any search engine results page. This is not good.

A well designed website creates a clear channel, a road map, for search engines, so they know to go exactly where you want them to go and see exactly what you want them to see.

Professionalism

In our other life, we are professional website developers. We make websites for people and charge them money for our services. Our primary obligation to our web clients is to prepare the best possible sites money can buy.

One way we do this is by way of validation. It is an independent means of determining how well we have done our jobs.

Conclusion

Validation is an independent means of determining one aspect of the quality of a website’s design. While the W3C’s validation doesn’t solve all web pages problems, it will prevent anything unexpected from happening in user’s browsers and helps to “future-proof” the site. A good designer will validate his pages and continue to check them in other browsers, just to make sure they’re doing what he wants them to do. That’s the hallmark of a professional-level designer.

Updated: November 18, 2005