vDezign Standards

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_standards: "Web standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites, and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods".

Well, ok, but why would -let's say- an online store owner care about standards? Is it just something that web design companies and freelancers use to get more money for their work? Let's think about it for a second from the programming point of view. When I build a website I always start with the basics: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And most of the time I use Internet Explorer and Firefox (and some other web browsers) to preview the layout of the page. Why? Different browsers have different ways to generate results (for example a JavaScript button, table cell, text etc.). That's the way it is, programmers have to create multiple codes just to have different browsers do the same thing. Maybe in the future Internet Explorer and Firefox will follow the same standards and that will mean both web browsers will generate the same exact results.

There's another benefit to using standards for the near future too. When writing the standards, the organizations test different browsers and find similarities in generating web pages. They publish all the findings online; so the programmers can know what to use to get similar results for most of the web browsers. So when I've coded this website for example I was constrained to follow some rules and that made my work harder, but I know that my website will look the same no matter what browser you are using. Go on, test this website with another browser! It will render the same.

So when a customer comes to your website and uses Firefox on a Mac operating system he will see a nice website where he can find products easily, just like he would if he would have used the Internet Explorer with Windows. On some websites it's so bad that it's just impossible to find anything, let alone order a product. So there you are with another happy customer, all because your website followed some Web standards.

I am following the W3C guidelines for all my websites. You may use the "Validation" links on the left to test the W3C validity of this website.