Web Standards. You may be wondering what is this all about? What kind of other geeky jargon is this. Why we seem to keen in promoting "Web Standards", like there’s less tech terminologies cluttering your mind already. Then "Accessibility", "Usability" why such jargons & "craps" matter?

Let’s start by defining "Accessibility" first, Accessibility in web design terminology according to web design glossary means the web industry practices to allowing web pages on the Internet as universally accessible as possible to all users, not discriminating by web browser used, and especially nor by users physical disabilities. For example, visually impaired users whom browsing websites using screen reader may have problem with pure graphical navigation without image’s alternative text, then deaf people may have difficulty fully understanding pages with audio components only.

According to web design glossary, "Usability" in web design is defined as set of layout, structure, arrangements, placement, typography & many other properties that makes website simple & easy to use. It’s a term used to denote the ease of which visitors can employ a particular website in order to achieve their particular goal. For example, inconsistent web layout structure & navigation may let visitors strayed and confused as to where their location on website or where to go. In other words, due to poor usability practice, visitors find a harder way around to find a piece of information they needed on a website, graphics-intensive pages may hinder good access for those without high-speed internet connections, etc.

Web standards can simply be defined as a set of standards & practices established by W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) for use in creating and interpreting web-based content which ensure the web-based contents are as widely accessible as possible to as many audience using any web browsers. Web standards practically setting requirments & standards to be met for the “universal” websites.

As widely accessible as possible means as many audience available be they plain normal people, ones with impairing vision, or color blindness, partially or completely lacking in hearing, elderly people, and more. Everyone including people with special requirements should be able to access the published information on website, whenever possible.

Any web browsers means any devices or browsers used to open the online content, be them different web browser brands / engines (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc) & their various versions (version 6.0, 7.0, 3.0, 4.0, etc.), be them PDAs, smart phones, notebooks & netbooks, or screen readers(!). This has been related to the Web standards term “accessible”.

Having said that, for any websites applying web standards actually means a very big difference to the others that’s ignorance of its existence, where websites adopting web standards at very least are having some immediate advantages as follows:

1. Enhance websites search engine overall ranking

Nothing more delicious from search engines point of view (which at their bone actually are essentially web spiders or web crawlers) than well written content, with clean, well structured and semantic markup inside the source code. Finding these kind of websites, search engines will just easily chew, digest, index & organize their contents. These all nothing but good, as will only result in a much more deep website content & structure comprehension “studied” by search engines, which in turn will eventually end up in an overall higher search engines ranking.

2. Faster web pages loading

Well structured markups which separate structure & content from presentation overall will be much more slim, concise and streamlined than the old way of using tables and spacers for laying out structure. Web pages then will be smaller in size which in turn become faster for visitors to download, while from website owners (you!), the website spends lower bandwidth data, which leads to lower cost. Nothing happier than knowing visitors get what they want (content on web pages) and they get them quickly and served fresh on their web browsers.

3. Solid foundation to website’s “accessibility”

Applying web standards will minimize the chance your website inaccessible to various different people with disabilities, or just using different web browsers, just using screen readers, just using slow dial up connection, and so on.

4. Solid ground to website’s “usability”

Having websites applying web standards will make website simpler and easier to use! By adopting web standards we improve the ease of which visitors make good use of content on our website in order to get their mission coming to our website in the 1st place accomplished.

5. Future ready websites

By separating content (your writings) & structure (XHTML markups) from presentation (CSS) and apply web standards, we have done the basic efforts we could for the content to be future proof (ready for the future). Content, in its plain simple & readable form, due to separation from its presentation information, become so intuitive and should be readable by any newer web browsers of the future. Be it any upcoming future web browsers, gadgets, cellular phones, PDAs, handheld devices, etc.

6. Allow websites to be much simpler to maintain

How would you rather prefer wading through tens kilobytes of nested tables, tr’s (rows), td’s (cells) and spacer images or just browse through a concise, clean and well-structured mark-up document when you need to update web pages?

Some might say, “That’s only true for web developers who experience & get used to seeing source code markups”, you said. The truth is, if you use, an obsolete Microsoft Front Page editor, for instance, you’ll easily get into trouble. How would you become relax and get a peace of mind, if you still need to scroll down the pages to see if there’s an extra formatting applied unintentionally or just some hard spaces.

Editing, inserting, removing content only (pure content) without its presentation data is lot much easier and efficient than having to make sure all the presentational code are right every now and then. One thing we learn will always true, that by using a separate styling sheet (CSS) file to control appearance makes it very simple anytime we make any site-wide design changes.

7. Reuse the same page for different purposes & devices

We can easily adapt the same web page for different purposes or different devices easily. No need to create several different pages for each different purpose. For example to adapt the same web pages for print takes only a separate “print” styling sheet. Same thing, to properly display content on handheld devices, smart phones, PDAs, or text only browsers, can be achieved by just linking to separate different styling sheet files.

8. Appear consistently across various web browsers

By applying web standards we have ensured our websites appear consistently across any various different “standard compliance” web browsers brands and versions available today. Do you use Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or 8? or Mozilla Firefox version 3.5, or 2.x or 1.x? What if you use Apple Safari? or Google Chrome? All will be just fine. By applying web standards, you can be sure, any “standard compliance” web browsers will render your websites just fine & consistently.

So, after realizing all "Web Standards" benefits, then who would mind adopting Web Standards? Please stand up..!

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