Meeting Web Standards

September 2005

Have you ever been to a website that just, you know, looked funny?

Maybe there were some pictures in the wrong place - or maybe the words spilled over the box they were supposed to be inside. And you thought - how could someone make a website and leave it half finished like that? Well - maybe they didn't know!

Whenever you look at a web page you are looking at it through your browser - if you use Windows and haven't installed anything else you've probably got Internet Explorer. But there are lots of different browsers - Firefox is becoming more and more popular as a cheap, secure, more fun alternative to Internet Explorer. People look at the web with Macintosh computers, Linux computers, phones, and their TV. People look at the web with text-only browsers or browsers that read the words aloud for them.

Now you know that web pages are made up of html code. You would think, reasonably enough, that all browsers would read html code the same way, so it would appear the same every time. You would think!

Most browsers read code slightly differently, so certain things that work properly with one browser might not work with another. Sometimes it's done on purpose (a browser reading for the blind doesn't need to render pictures) and sometimes it just doesn't.

In 1990 Oxford graduate Tim Berners-Lee created the program WorldWideWeb which became the world wide web we know today - he "invented" the world wide web. In October 1994 he and others formed the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It's mission is "To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web." That just means that they try to find ways to make sure that more people can use the web more easily.

W3C set standards in how web code should be - so that browsers and people building web pages can both aim to meet in the same place and everyone's websites will look the same. A lot of techies from all over the world have spent a lot of time working out the optimal way to do things, and recorded it in the W3C standards.

You can take any web page you like and test it against the W3C standards.

Test that a page is proper html according to its doctype
Test that a page uses stylesheets correctly
Test that a page is accessible as it can be. This one is a bit more complex and can't be done entirely by a computer, so it returns a list of things for you to check out yourself.

These links are also at the bottom of this page so you can check this page.

W3C are not an authority, the standards are a guideline not the law, and nothing will happen if you don't follow them.

Except that people will come to your site, and maybe the navigation won't work, so they're stuck on the first page. Or maybe the borders are in the wrong place.

Now the funny thing is that the most common browser, Internet Explorer 6.0, doesn't follow the W3C standards as well as it could. So a lot of bad designers think - well if I write for Internet Explorer 6.0 that'll get most people (60%) and never mind the rest, it'll just have to look funny. Or they only use one browser and don't even know that the problem exists!

They could be turning away up to 40% of their visitors! Why bother having a website at all?

A W3C-compliant website means that pretty much everyone can get to your website and hear your message. Accept nothing less.

Leanne Smith is a founder of Sleek Services, a popular web solutions service that builds intelligent websites for intelligent people. For more articles or to see what an intelligent, high-traffic website can do for you visit www.SleekServices.net.