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why standards compliancy is a good thing
Web standards are important. Are you adhering to them?
The web is slowly moving forward – with tables being ditched for semantic CSS/XHTML markup and people realising how much easier to work with it is. But something else is happening; a movement that is further creating a divide between designers. What I am referring to is web standards...
Only in recent years are things beginning to become standardised. Accessibility laws have come into play for businesses and with more people jumping on the web design bandwagon, it has become abundantly clear that markup has to be as clear and as readable as possible. This means semantic markup that validates to W3C standards.
But why? As long as the site looks right, right? No. And heres why:
- Valid markup is easier to read, which is important for future editing or passing the code onto another designer
- There's a greater chance of cross-browser compatibility if you take time to craft semantic, valid markup
- Search engines will be able to spider the pages better. I have seen no evidence that this affects rankings, but I would hazard a guess that it probably does have a minor influence
- Pages load faster due to less markup
Also, and this can have a big impact, you will get more respect from fellow designers.
For further reading I recommend the W3Schools website which has lots of decent tutorials on many web subjects. So if you’re still using tables for web design, you really do need to get into the 21st century!
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