The
standards are only a guideline, but smart web designers and web developers pay
heed to what the organization has to say. In fact many of the web programming
jobs found on web design freelancer job boards, specifically requests that the
code used to build a website is W3C validated. Although fairly common for XHTML
and HTML it is becoming increasingly important especially if the web site is a
total CSS web site.
Tim
Berners-Lee who pretty much invented the World Wide Web when he developed the
first web browser back in 1989 and other industry pioneers created the
consortium to promote the standardization of the technologies used on the World
Wide Web. Without some level of standardization, the internet would not be a
global medium it is today. Interoperability between different machines requires
a standard interface and standardized data communication protocols to carry the
information back and forth.
That
is the W3C’s mission. To publish the standards necessary so that all computers
can speak the same language and communicate and all web browsers render web
pages so that look and act the same way. The consortium also engage in efforts
to educate web designers and developers so they will work together to build
their websites on the W3C standards.
Because
of the work of the consortium, someone using a Macintosh in China or a windows
XP machine in Canada can access a web page hosted on a Linux server in South
America. If that web page was created using validated HTML and CSS code, the
webpage should appear very similar and have the same basic functionality on all
of the different operating systems and web browsers available.
Why
is Using Standardized and Validated Code Important?
Although
all web browsers understand and render HTML, they don’t all do it the same way.
Each browser has proprietary extensions to HTML and CSS that it uses to create
special effects because none of the standardized code can do what they web
designers wants to do. The result is that code that looks and works great in
Internet Explore may crash Firefox, Opera or Safari and vice versa.
Unfortunately, many web designers choose to code for internet explore and
ignore the other 35% of web surfers. There are hundreds of different browsers
and more appearing as PDAs, cell phones and practically every other imaginable
electronic device is being built to be “internet compatible”.
It
is impossible to test your web pages on every browser. While testing on the
major browsers will probably be sufficient for most people, web designers who
want their websites to work on as many different platforms as possible can
check the code they write to see if it meets the standards.
Why don’t all the web designers and web developers use W3C validated code?
Why don’t all the web designers and web developers use W3C validated code?
They
don’t use it because none of the most popular HTML editors generate 100%
compatible code. The newer the standards, the less likely the code generated
meet them. Of all the HTML editors available, Dreamweaver does the best job and
Front Page the worst job. It’s not surprising that FrontPage, which is a
Microsoft product, writes code almost exclusively for internet explorer. The
rest of the popular HTML editors, rank somewhere between FrontPage and
Dreamweaver.
Hand
coding is no guarantee that the code will meet the standards either unless the
person writing the code is well versed in the latest standards. Another problem
is that a lot of the fancier and nicer features available are not universally
supported by web browsers. Many web designers and web developers choose to
ignore the 35% of web surfers so they can use the effects they want to use. In
some cases, the site looks ok but doesn’t have all the functionality. Drop down
menus are a common element commonly used that don’t work in some popular
browsers. A good web designer will add a text link somewhere on the page for
the parts of the menu that don’t work in all browsers. That way, the majority
of visitors get the cool features while the others can still get where they
want to go.
Summary
As
the number of web browsers continues to increase, standardized code becomes
absolutely essential. If you use non-standard, non-validated code that doesn't
work in a particular browser, it is your fault. If you use standard, validated
code and it doesn't work, it is a bug in the web browser. The W3C organization
offers an official public validator service at http://validator.w3.org.
Aqeel
Ahmed Zaman is
an Internet Business Consultant and Online Web Marketing Executive for Gexton
Pakistan. Gexton Pakistan offers the complete web
solution for your websites from web
design layout
to the Search Engine Optimization services.
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