What are Web Standards?
Posted by Jordan Little on March 29, 2010
In layman’s terms, web standards are simply rules and methods of creating websites. It’s a very organic and complicated subject, but the reason we try to adhere to these standards is that, in the end, it benefits our clients.
Load Times and Server Costs
Ideally, a website that follows web standards (as all of ours do) will keep content and design files separated. That is, any file that defines content should have no bearing on how that content is displayed. Design files are created separately and are applied to the content when the user accesses the site. This means faster loading times due to the fact that a user only has to download this design file once. It also means faster updates, less expensive bandwidth, snappier loading, and, overall, a website that is much easier to manage.
Accessibility
Keeping design and content separate means we can work with the content by itself without any of the design instructions getting in the way. This is extremely handy when dealing with screen readers. A screen reader is a piece of software that lets visually disabled people surf the web by reading the text on the screen aloud. Screen readers have to wade through all the code of a website to pull out the juicy bits of useful content. Standards based sites make this very easy and quite helpful to those with disabilities.
It’s not just physical disabilities that we’re talking about, however, when referring to accessibility. Have you ever tried to visit a website on your mobile phone? It’s very frustrating if your phone is struggling to load a large website with lots of graphics and imagery. Keeping content and design separate allows us to cater to these mobile browsers and serve the site with minimal design and graphics.
Browser Compatibility
There are a lot of browsers out today — Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome just to name a few. For the most part, the makers of these browsers have all agreed to follow web standards and display a website that follows these rules properly. If you break these rules or don’t follow them, a website will look very different across these various browsers. Not too good for brand building.
Future Proofing
The web changes at an insanely fast rate. However, standards, by their nature, can only change once every few years, so having your site designed with web standards can greatly increase your chance of having your site up and running for years to come, while still being easily maintained.
Search Engines
Search engines are essentially automated web browsers that traverse the internet saving every website they come across. The are programmed to work, but not too hard, and find good content that can be easily indexed. Standards based designs, having no design instructions, are easily analyzed and almost always do better than a comparable website that doesn’t follow standards.
Conclusion
As mentioned, web standards are a very confusing and ever-changing set of rules, but if followed, can provide a lot of benefits. Essentially, standards based designs are overwhelmingly positive and if you want your website to be fast, easy to maintain, and cost-effective, make sure your web design company knows all about these standards and how to implement them.