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Written by Larry Dearing
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Saturday, 19 December 2009 18:12 |
W3C standards for web development are a set of guidelines set down by the World Wide Web Consortium to establish best practice for a variety of web site development markup languages such at HTML and XHTML. Many developers and coders differ as to just how important they are. While this seems like an obviously good idea, is it really necessary?
There are solid advantages to using the standards. We know search engine page rank and placement can depend to a large degree on efficient "spidering" of a website's pages. Standards also offer more cross browser and cross platform compatibility and makes it easier for more than one developer or coder to look at how a web page is constructed. These standards will also create a singe foundation as websites look more and more toward accessibility for the disabled, such as voice browsers and adjustable font size controls.
Getting a site to validate to W3C standards can be quite a chore though. A lot of website builders say it often is not worth it or in some instances impossible. The truth is a website can be coded very poorly, much like a very poorly written essay with bad grammar and sentence structure, yet can still function and render a correct website page. Non standard websites can function fine, work well across browsers and look fine. Many special scripts, function modules, or widgets don't fit in well with the standards making validation impossible, but again it works fine.
While some insist these standards must always be followed and some insist they have no importance, most of the website building community has their on fairly agreed upon "standards" in their overall opinions. Just as the W3C sets down standards on website development, many in the website builder community have also established some standard thoughts and opinions about their importance. The most common opinion held is that doing your best to follow them whenever possible is important to gain all of the benefits the standards offer. However because of the reality of many important and necessary scripts and modules not being compliant, you go for real function (a correct working script) over form (a nice compliant site).
This "follow whenever possible" mindset is probably a good philosophy to adopt for your website. You should be aware of the W3C standards and tell your developer/designer that you would like your finished product to be compliant wherever possible. Now days many if not most professional templates for HTML or CMS type systems like Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal are W3C compliant out of the box, and with a little care will remain compliant. You can even check the validation of your website's pages on line. There are even "pride badges" that you can put on pages that validate.
Related off-site links:
Wikipedia article on the W3C
Online W3C validation test |
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