W3C, World Wide Web Consortium, Standards Compliant Web Development, HTML, CSS, Web Design Standards, FireFox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer, IE9, Quirksmode, Backwards Compatibility.
www.w3.org
The World Wide Web Consortium, also referred to as the W3C, is a group of people (a non-profit organization) that creates modern standards for web technologies. It is these standards that are driving the Internet of today.
What does that mean?
It means that since 1994, this group of people has shaped the way we design and develop pages for the web using such standards as the various versions of HTML, protocols such as HTTP and FTP, and CSS (to name only a few of the many technologies with which they are involved).
Standards Compliance
The W3C specification dictates to the browsers the code that they must support.
Basically:
Web design standards (W3C Standards) are constantly evolving, and will continue to do so.
Modern browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. keep pace with W3C standards as they evolve and this means that web developers, like myself, have to keep constant pace with standards as well so as to properly develop websites according to these modern specifications.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the bane of web developers worldwide, has not been playing nice up to now, however, there is some excitement about the upcoming IE9 being much more standards compatible than its predecessors.
Web developers can hopefully breathe a sigh of relief, as it has, even as I write this, required a considerable number of additional hours, headaches, hair-pulling and shocking language eruptions (otherwise known as “browser hacks”), as well as extra costs to the client, to make otherwise beautifully performing standards-compatible websites perform adequately in every version of Internet Explorer from IE6 to IE8!
To be fair to IE though, in the past, browser hacks were used with other browsers as well, but in recent years this has become less of a necessity, as most modern browsers are on-board with the W3C specification.
My site was designed in the late 1990′s (wow!), early to mid 2000′s – is it still Standards Compatible?
Easy answer: No.
Your site is now most likely limping along on what is known as “deprecated” code, and the only reason you can view it in your modern browser is because it is being rendered in “Quirks Mode” or “backwards compatibility mode“. This is not an ideal long-term solution, especially if you are maintaining a business website.
The W3C defines deprecated as follows:
“A deprecated element or attribute is one that has been outdated by newer constructs … Deprecated elements may become obsolete in future versions of HTML.”
Put simply, it means that web designers have been shifting towards using standards compliant XHTML with CSS styles to dictate things such as content layout and formatting, instead of using now-deprecated inline styles, tables for content layout (note: tables are better suited for tabular data), DHTML, etc.
As an example, websites that were developed in the past for older browsers such as IE5, IE6, IE7 etc. are now (in 2010) basically built upon what is now considered mostly deprecated code (no longer standardized).
This means that some or even a majority of features of websites that once worked wonderfully in these older browsers now suddenly don’t work anymore in the newer, updated versions of modern, standards compliant, browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, IE8, etc.
Owning a website developed with deprecated code means that the website owner now owns a ‘broken’ site (i.e. it does not perform as designed any longer).
The other problem with hanging on to a site built upon deprecated code is that the site is not search engine friendly either.
To paraphrase a whole lot of technical jargon for the layman: Google recommends in its documentation that a standards compliant website is preferable for indexing by its bot (Googlebot) than a non-standards compliant site.
The easiest way to explain this problem is that a deprecated site is no longer a ‘user-friendly website’, ergo, it is also no longer a ‘search-engine friendly’ website.
This is because a standards compliant site is also, by association, instantly a more user-friendly site than its deprecated cousin, therefore, it enjoys superior ‘rankability’ with a major search engine such as Google.
How can I fix my deprecated website and make it standards compliant?
The only way to fix this problem is to re-design and develop the deprecated website using standards compliant code, and the only way to prevent the same from happening again in the future is to keep the website up to date according to current W3C standards. For this, it is highly recommended to employ the skills and know-how of an experienced web designer/developer.
And a word of caution about WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get) and employing the skills of a developer who has not bothered to maintain his or her education on the latest standards: (There are still some of those guys and gals around, and yes, they are still developing sites for clients using deprecated code – sad but true!)
Microsoft FrontPage is a retired piece of software (has not been available for sale for many years now), and no, you are not doing yourself any favors by using it to re-develop your website. The reason is that it generates ‘deprecated’ code, not modern standards compatible code. There are probably a few other editors out there (like older versions of Adobe’s Dreamweaver) that hold the same inherent dangers.
Microsoft Word is NOT a suitable web site editor. It generates horrifically terrible proprietary code that has absolutely nothing in common with developing a good standards compliant website.
Before you hire a developer, make sure that they are not using any of the above applications to develop their clients websites, and do make sure that you only hire someone that is really experienced and who knows what they’re doing.
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Tags: seo, standards-compliance, w3c, web design, web development
