“The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call ‘web standards’, are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web.” http://webstandardsgroup.org/standards/
Web standards are just as important as standards for EVERYTHING. There must be a consistancy in everything! If one person designs a web page and in turn he uses some code or application that only works well with the iPhone, then people on computers, or other PDAs could not read it.
As a web designer you want your web pages to be available to be seen by as many people as possible. Without any standard, the only people that would see your site is the few that it is designed for. This is fine if you are working on a corporate INTRAnet site, but not for something you want other outside parties to see. Without the adaptability and flexability that there is now, people would not be able to learn, grow, and connect to people from all over the world!
The most important standards on the Web are not technological, they’re social. They are the standards that software and web sites need to reach before people find something useful. If you can, yes, use web standards to make your app more accessible, or to save on your bandwidth costs, or give you better visibility among your peers.
But standards can be a false idol, and praying to validation is putting technology before humans. The mere act of validation doesn’t suddenly make something accessible to all, so judging designers on validation doesn’t say much either. Don’t make standards or validation an absolute necessity if they’re going to hold you back from coming up with something like Gmail that completely changes the way we use the Web.
Time has shown, that the most successful web sites are the ones that
- constantly adapt
to the needs of their audience. Today’s site is different than tomorrow’s. I can see that designers will need to be permanent design team, or perhaps hold an advisory role, simply because they need to be around to change their work over time. At the very least, they will have to create interfaces that can be easily modified by others who continue to work on the project after they leave.
That leaves designers with the problem of how to create interfaces that are adaptable to change, that can be modified when necessary, that don’t require another complete redesign to fix. That will be a big challenge going forward, and why we need to have a standard of web programming and languages.
http://www.webstandards.org/
http://webstandardsgroup.org/
http://bokardo.com/archives/five-principles-to-design-by/
One Comment
I like your in dept viewpoint on what web standards is…i think we really need to take in consideration the user and these standards seem to implement technology side as well as touching the human user in this consideration!! If you take a look at Joomla, and even wordpress these tools are Content Management Systems, they are kind of what you stated in your last paragraph about creating interfaces that are adaptable to change, designers create somewhat templates for users such as businesses to use to alter and change and add content to a website!! It gives other users access to it as well!! Take a look at its features here, http://www.joomla.org/. As a future web designer I kind of feel overwhelmed with all thats out there so im trying to slowly and gradually get familiar with all thats out there