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[5thMay'07] - Understanding W3 Compliant Web Design
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was established in order to develop a set of pre-defined practice standards for the internet. The W3C acknowledge that, in order for the web to reach its full potential that the fundamental web technologies need to be compatible with each other and with any hardware or software used to access the internet.
W3C is comprised of member organizations and companies whose staff is engaged for the purpose of working together to develop standards. The W3C has written more than ninety standards, known as W3C recommendations, which can be viewed as an overall design philosophy as well as a strictly-defined set of practices for building websites. W3C have produced standards which govern all the most fundamental elements of website design including, recommendations for markup languages (HTML, XHTML, SVG and XForms), style sheets (CSS), JavaScript and for the Document Object Model.
Conforming to W3C standards confers benefits for you, the developer and also for your end users. Of the benefits, enhanced website accessibility is probably the most important. A compliant website will be more visible to search engines, thereby increasing site traffic. In addition, compliant websites enhance accessibility for the end user. Clients who use non-traditional browsers, including voice browsers and Braille browsers, or hand-held browsers with very little monitor space, are easily catered for when W3C compliant coding is used.
Writing web pages in a manner congruent with the W3C standards means that your development time will be reduced. The processes of debugging and trouble-shooting become easier because the code is written in a standard fashion. Further, your W3C compliant documents will be easily convertible to other formats, including databases and word documents. Migration of compliant documents to new systems, such as televisions and PDAs is also much simpler when code is W3C compliant.
Stability is also improved when your code is W3C compliant. The W3C standards are written with considerable thought to both forwards and backwards compatibility, to ensure that data written to old standards will continue to work in newer browsers, and that data written to newer versions will produce an acceptable result in older browsers. If your code is compliant, you won’t have to worry about creating many versions of the one code to ensure that everyone can view your developed page.
W3C compliant coding ensures universality. The standards offer a set of rules that all developers can learn, follow and utilize. It would be unrealistic to expect that only one designer will be involved in the development and maintenance of a website. If standards-compliant coding is used, each developer will be easily able to understand the coding conventions, and new designers can pick up where their predecessors left off.
Adoption of the W3C compliant coding by web developers will ensure the web is a more streamlined, functional place for developers and end users. As the variety of web access methods increases, the need to adjust or duplicate websites to satisfy all needs will also intensify. Following a set of pre-defined standards is a step towards solving this problem.
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