What are Web standards?
The World Wide Web has had basically three very distinct and unique players until recently: developers, users and browsers. On this play browsers set the stage, developers acted upon it and users just watched. Given this very basic structure, browsers were free to accomodate rules in order to please the other two parties. The goal was clear: becoming the stage of choice before competing browsers made it. The tiny and somehow lax set of rules that were proposed in the original HTML specification was quickly augmented by each of the browsers, in a race where the end always justified the means.
But then the Web grew in both size and complexity. Not all browsers were born equal: mobile ones lacked the hardware their desktop equivalents had in excess. Different classes of users called for different treatment: visually impaired readers did not have the same needs as search engine bots. The Web as business began to show its twofold face: millons of users meant thousands spent in bandwidth; fierce competition meant having to attract and retain customers with both usable and attractive user interfaces. Yet, the rules than ran page structure were faddish at best.
With the turn of the century, Web developers began to look for alternatives to try and cope with the upcoming chaos. Luckily the rules were already on the table: the W3C had very precise reccomendations regarding scalable Web site development, that took into account the needs of all parties, ranging from search engines to mobile browsers. Following the old software design adage of separation of concerns, the consortium decided to simplify HTML, the base language of the web, which was to be used exclusively for what it was first intended: content. All things presentation were to be defined using a recently created language called CSS. To finish the picture, client-side behavior was to be defined using a standardized version of Javascript. Web development had finally grown of age: producing scalable, computer-processable, mantainable, visually-attractive, accessible Web sites meant adhering to strict standards. Just like in every other branch of software development!
But web browsers continue to be lenient with non-compliant sites, which has slowed down standards adoption. Let Aggiorno lend you a helping had to swiftly jump on the fast lane of standards: by fixing tag structuring and syntax errors, your site will take a giant leap forward towards simple, ubiquitous, content-describing HTML code. After you eliminate deprecated, style-geared tags and attributes, you are getting really close to making full use of CSS for style definition. Talk about pole positioning, now that all the big industry players are struggling to come up with strictly standards-compliant browsers.
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