What Are Web Standards?
"Web Standards" refers to a website design technology that makes websites more accessible to more people and devices (such as PDA's and cellphones), easier to maintain, more search engine friendly, and faster to download.
These improvements are achieved by separating the computer code governing the content of the website from the code governing its design.
Don't mix apples with oranges
Traditionally, the code of most websites combines design and content elements into an at times incomprehensible mishmash that confuses search engines, browsers, and users accessing the internet on increasingly popular alternative devices, such as PDA's, screen readers, or cell phones.
Web Standards places all the computer code that controls your site's layout, fonts, color scheme, etc. into one file, and your content (what really matters to a online visitor or search engine) into another file. It's that simple.
CSS/XHTML: The technology Microsoft learned to love
The name of the technology that can separate design from content is a mouthful: Cascading Styles Sheets/Extensible Hypertext Markup Language. We just call it CSS/XHTML, or Standards-based design. Whatever you call it, it is the future design medium for the Internet.
There is actually nothing particularly new about CSS/XHTML, or Web Standards. The technology has been around since 1998, and was developed by a disparate bunch of very smart people who wanted to improve the Internet, and make it more accessible to more users, by means of standardizing the way websites are coded and displayed in browsers.
Unfortunately for these very smart people (and for Internet as a whole), none of them worked for Microsoft. And since Microsoft produces the far-and-away most popular browser - Internet Explorer - the new Web Standards were meaningless unless Microsoft adopted them too. Which they didn't.
Until now.
With the release of the new Internet Explorer version 7 (IE7) in January 2007, Microsoft embraced most of the Web Standards that the Web development community has been advocating for nine years.
Convert or die (or just fade away)
What does this mean to you? It means you can now confidently convert your website to a Standards-based design, and enjoy the exciting benefits of Web Standards, all with the assurance that, with Microsoft backing the technology, your freshly converted website is bulletproof and futureproof - that is, built to last.
The combined benefits of a Standards-based website are so powerful that the conversion of an existing website to a Standards-based design makes compelling sense now for just about every website online.
Read on to learn more about the benefits of Standards-based Web design, and how it can help your company dramatically increase its online presence today.
To learn more about the grass-roots movement that blossomed into Web Standards, visit www.webstandards.org.
Inquiries: info@candlewoodwebworks.com