About Web Standards

There is currently a revolution underway in the web development field. The fundamental practices and methods of web design are changing from an old-fashioned visual approach to what is called a standards based approach.

To understand this shift, it is necessary to know just a bit about the history of web design. In 1992, the world wide web was introduced, along with the first version of HTML (HyperText Markup Language). HTML is the tool used to create the actual content of the pages. At the time the web was not intended to be a vehicle for commerce, nor was it designed for the lay computer user. Instead, it was a way for researchers to share information quickly over the Internet.

In the mid 1990s, however, the general public became connected to the Internet, and companies desiring web pages now wanted these pages to look as good as their print materials. To accomplish this, designers developed a number of tricks and solutions to achieve certain visual effects, often using elements of HTML in ways they were never intended. Although often clever, there were two problems with these tricks and solutions. First, since they took advantage of the way that current web browser programs displayed HTML, designs would often break when new versions of the browsers were released. Second, since they often used elements of HTML in ways they were not intended for the sake of how the pages looked in the popular web browsers, the actual underlying code didn’t make any sense logically. This means that while pages might look good in today’s web browsers, the code is virtually incomprehensible to other kinds of readers, such as screen readers for the blind, cell phones, PDAs, and other computers trying to index the page (such as search engines).

The recently released XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) fixes these problems. Because XHTML is technically a subset of XML, web pages are now completely standardized and compatible all other data now and in the future. By removing all visual and design elements from the code, the pages are now structurally sound, which means they make sense to all kinds of readers.

For more information on standards based web design, here are some useful links: