Dear GWATTMOTW,

I’ve heard and read you talk about ‘web standards’. What are they and why are they important?

Sincerely,
What’s-the-fuss

Dear Fussy,

Technically speaking the term ‘web standards’ is a bit of a misnomer. What we mean when we say ‘web standards’ is the Recommendations as handed down from the World Wide Web Consortium a non-profit organization headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented HTML. Simply put, this organization establishes the standards for all the open technologies that are used on the web such as HTML, XML, CSS and many other mark-up languages of which you may never have heard.

As a web developer, the standards provide me with a basis for building my pages. Prior to the acceptance of the standards, web pages were generally built to emulate printed page as closely as possible on-screen. This was due to the fact that most web designers came from print and publication layout backgrounds and were using the tools they already had. However, like any medium, the web has its own tools and limitations and the standards define those.

Simply put, following the web standards makes your website a website instead of a flyer on a screen. Less simply put, the standards help us to ensure that the a website takes advantage of all the benefits that come with the web — universal accessibility, common experience across all platforms, clean and better organized pages.

Of course, this doesn’t even begin to address the advantages that the standards provide for things like search engine indexing or, conversely, the coding hacks needed to make the theory work in practice on many browsers. But, those are topics for other letters.

Sincerely,
The Guy with Answers to the Mysteries of the Web

P.S. If you are a web designer and want to read more about how this affects the way you design for the web, read this great article by Craig Cook at A List Apart.