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What are web standards? The term “standards” simply refers to the web standards movement. This concept is simply summarized as creating one standard upon which future browsers are being designed and web pages are created. For more information, visit the Web Standards Project (WaSP), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), or read on for our take on the subject.

history

In the old days when Internet Explorer and Netscape reigned supreme there began what are now called the browser wars. Each company was developing different browsers in an effort to gain market share and each browser interpreted HTML very differently. To make matters worse, not only did each new browser treat HTML differently, each version of the browsers treated it differently. The result was that designers effectively had to create several different versions of the same site just to have it look and function the same (or sometimes only similar) in each browser. This cost companies time and money when their browser was updated with a new version and the old site no longer worked as intended.

today

Enter the web standards movement. With browser developers working together to create one standard way of presenting HTML and CSS, websites designed with standards are actually forward compatible. What this means is that companies don’t run into the problem of a technically obsolete website with each new browser release.

In addition to saving companies time and money, web standards make the lives of millions of web users easier. With web standards, visitors to a site have inherently faster download times because of the use of one CSS file. The style sheet takes a good portion of the code (the code that controls the look of each page) out of the HTML pages and puts it into the CSS file. Your browser loads the CSS file on the first page you visit and then automatically saves or "caches" it for reuse elsewhere on that site. The caching of the CSS and smaller HTML files come together to create a faster loading site. This saves bandwidth, which is important to the site owner, and it saves download time, which is important to your visitors. At the same time, the revamped HTML files now contain only the content of the site, which makes the site easier to index by the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.).

To put is all simply, web standards make sense and we support them because they help to provide our clients with a website that's easy to use, easy to maintain, and saves on future development costs.