Writing a post about web standards on a design forum website, I run the risk of preaching to the choir. However, it’s an important topic and I figure even the most ardent of web standards proponents could use a little affirmation, or just a chance to ring in with an “amen” or even a “no idiot, it’s more like this…”

“Web Standards” is a buzz term that has been tossed around for over ten years, likely beginning with the formation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994. So what is it, and why should you care? Simply put, web standards are a set of guidelines that have been established to try to keep everyone on the same page, speaking the same language. The Web is a very complex environment, with a plethora of programming languages, browsers, servers and operating systems all trying to communicate.

It’s not like the old days of desktop software development, when a programmer knew he was writing a piece of code that would run only on MS-DOS 3.0. Now, when a programmer is building a web application, he has no idea exactly what environment his code will be used in. A user could be using Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 6 or 7, Safari, or Opera, and they could be on a Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac, or Linux machine. Right there, you’re looking at 14 different environments.

For each piece of code you write, are you going to do a browser check and have 14 “if… then” statements to handle each case? Of course not, that would be silly. You will sleep much better if you write one piece of code that you know will work properly in any environment. Enter Web Standards.

The W3C is the foremost authority on determining what the standard protocols are. They have a great definition for what Web standards: “The most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together.”

Today, I’m not going to get into details about creating standard XHTML, CSS, SOAP, XML, DOM, or any other combination of letters I can throw together. I’m more concerned with people who want to take a practical approach to making sure their sites are going to work properly and not break. So what does the average person testing a website need to be concerned with? I would recommend starting with these three things: HTML, CSS, and RSS.

You can obviously take this a lot further, especially on more sophisticated sites and applications. If you can at least verify those three are standards compliant, you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches. The W3C provides several validation tools to make sure your code is valid, including the basics:

HTML – http://validator.w3.org/
CSS – http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
RSS – http://validator.w3.org/feed/

This is a very complex issue that could easily be turned into a college course. I hope that this will at least give you a starting point for utilizing Web standards so you can do your part to make sure the Web is a cleaner, safer place.

About: Brian Cendrowski

After spending 10 years in full-service website development, Brian founded Unmatched Quality, a website testing provider. Unmatched Quality can do the grunt work that you don’t have the time or patience to do. We will kick around a website to verify that all the pieces of the sites work. We can also make sure the site performs well in all the major browsers, test performance so you don’t lose those impatient visitors, and confirm that the site sticks to web standards, which helps ensure your site is accessible to everyone. If you’ve ever been frustrated because your customers continue to find issues with your sites, perhaps we can help. You can contact Brian at 803-319-0784 or brian [at] unmatchedquaility.com.