Web Standards Index

1 What are Web Standards?
- 1.1 Trinity of Web Standards
2 Why Use Web Standards
3 How do use Web Standards
- 3.1 The Transition takes time
- 3.2 Further reading
4 Who is using Web Standards
5 Other Resources
- 5.1 Validation
- 5.2 Microformats

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What are Web Standards?

How to Grok Web Standards — Craig Cook on A List Apart
Web Standards — As explained on Wikipedia

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Trinity of Web Standards

Content (markup, HTML)
Design (stylesheets, CSS)
Behaviour(dom scripting, JavaScript)

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Why Use Web Standards

http://webstandards.org/learn/faq/

Watch Paul Boag's presentation on Web Standards. Much of the information below has been largely influenced by his resources.

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Do you care about?

return on investment
staying ahead of competition
ensuring consistent online branding
responding to your customers
reaching the widest possible audience
meeting your legal obligations
preparing for the future

Our websites are becoming business critical. HTML has gone so far away from what HTML was designed to be.

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Business Cost of NOT using Web Standards

Simplicity swept aside, only Web Designer or Web Developer can maintain our Websites
Incredibly expensive to redesign, so quickly out of date, harder to change and thus we can't adapt quickly
Web team has become a bottleneck because every change needs to go through them
Even if you want a CMS, the web team still needs to be involved if the markup is so complicated and convoluted
Editors wreck your brand identity because we need WYSIWYG to understand and maintain
You can't respond quickly to competition and market demands
Can someone print your website? What does the print out look like? Probably a horrible mess.
How does your website look in different browsers? Resolutions?
What if Flash is disabled? Or JavaScript? A significant number of business block these technologies
Can you test different designs easily?
Disability Obligations, what are your legal requirements?
Small screen devices? Mobiles are a huge growth area in the upcoming months and years.

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Business Benefits

Separation of content, design and behaviour

Total control over design
- Quick and inexpensive to change
- Total control over print
Avoid web team bottlenecks
- More compatible with content management systems
- Non designers can create great looking pages
  - Describe the content, not the style.
- Easier for anybody to update
More responsive
- Easier to experiment (think CSS Zen Garden)
- design and populate simultaneously (design sign-off does not hold up building site, and putting content in)
Never turn away a customer
- Works with older browsers
- Works with all browsers, platforms
- Faster to download
  - Page sizes tend to be much much smaller
- Works with alternate devices
- Disabled and older users
  - In the UK alone, the disabled audience has a spending power of 50Billion pounds
Increase your Exposure
- Microformats
Future proof your site
- Upcoming browsers, platforms

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How do use Web Standards

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The Transition takes time

training of staff
migration of legacy content, templates

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Who is using Web Standards

Many people. Mostly driven by Web Developers who are aware of the benefits, however, Businesses are becoming more and more educated on this subject all the time. As a result, it's not uncommon for a client or your boss to encourage or even make them a requirement on your project.

Some great and classic examples are listed below:

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