designNinja

You have everything, a wonderful Logo, a cool name for your product or service, and if lucky, a matching domain name. You’ve made a wonderful mock-up, and things are beginning to look better. The mockup matches the current design standards, it has everything a user wants, and hopefully, everything he needs. You have your server team ready to do all the data crunching, everything looks itching to start, except you need to convert the mockup into a template which the server scripts can use.

That, or you are making a static website, and you are still stuck with mockups, and are planning to create actual pages.

In either case, you need to make a Web presence, something unique, something personal, something to be proud of. So why not make one which follow standards.

What are Web Standards?

Web Standards is a term which defines the path of a Web-Ninja. Written by the associations like World Wide Web Consortium(W3C), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Unicode Consortium etc , these recommendations define the way Web Environment and related entities should behave.

For everything that you do on web, right from the Hello World example basic page, to complex applications like Gmail, Netvibes and Y! Mash, there are standards defined. When we say that we are making a “Web Standard” Compliant web page, (apart from that nifty Web2.0 design) we expect to follow some of the common guidelines, namely:

• W3C recommendations for markup languages, such as HTML, XHTML, SVG, and XForms.
• W3C recommendations for stylesheets, namely CSS (and XSLT etc).
• Ecma International Standards for ECMAScript, a.k.a. JavaScript.
• W3C Recommendations for the Document Object Model (DOM).

Why follow Standards?

Simply, because its useful to follow defined standards. Imagine making purchase for a Garden Watering pipe, you go to the Hardware store and the only thing he needs to know is the length of the pipe you desire. Everything else is by standards. All taps have the same diameter, and all Home use Water pipes are of standard cross-sectional area. Were it not so, troubleshooting small problems would be a nightmare.

The analogy is same in case of Web. Sure, the browsers are coded to be nice to the end users. They show the content in the best possible way and do not hide information from the needy on coding faults of the Web Designer/Developer. As a result, over the years, the web industry has become lazy.

Most outsourcing firms wont give you a standard compliant code unless you ask for it, and even if you ask, they may not have the necessary skill set for it. Remember, these guys have been in business for years now, while standards is the new hep thing. When you design by standards, you get benefits of Accesibility and Stability. Standard compliant pages render correctly across browsers, across various versions, and are faster loading, easier to modify and bug-fix. If that doesn’t get you going, I don’t know what will.

Ask for standards, the web deserves it.

-dN

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