What are Web Standards?

A (very) Brief History of the Internet

The governing body of Web Standards is called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short). Here's the story in a nutshell in very rough chronological order:

1. In the beginning the internet was created
2. People needed to share information systematically
3. A language was developed to help people share their information. This language was called Hypertext Markup language (HTML)
4. Different organisations decided to write software applications to help people interpret HTML into something more user friendly and readble. These software applications were called "Internet Browsers"
5. Everybody created their own rules regarding how HTML should be interpretted
6. Microsoft held the lions share of the market with their software "Internet Explorer" so people designed websites almost solely for that browser. People using other software didn't stand a chance as their browsers rendered websites very differently to how they were intended.
7. People started putting "Browser Sniffers" and "code hacks" into website which would deliver a different chunk of code depending on what browser you were using to view the site.  Very clumsy and bandwidth/processer heavy.
8. The W3C was founded, the core purpose of group was to focus the development of the internet - to achieve convergent evolution - so everyone was reading from the same songbook.
9. The W3C set up various rules and regulations which, when adhered to, led to websites which were head and shoulders beyond their predecessors.

The Benefits of Web Standards 

Websites that adhere to W3C guide lines have several key benefits to websites which don't:

1. Markup (XHTML/CSS) is very clean and takes less downloading. Busy sites are cheaper to run as they use less bandwidth. CSS styling information is cached - i.e. it is downloaded only once - saving even more bandwidth. You only need to download the content.
2. Search Engines love good markup. A well built website tends to rank much higher than a similar, poorly built website.
   
3. Websites are cross-platform compatible. No "sniffers" or "hacks" should be needed to make the website render almost identically in any browser, even mobile phones, screen readers and text browsers aren't left out. This is extremely important to people who don't use graphical browsers like the visually impared.
4. Websites are future-proof. Since W3C stands for convergent evolution of technology it has already placed a target in the middle of the field - designers and developers are already aiming for this target, meanwhile browser technologies are catching up.

Sputnik are proud to meet W3C standards and strive to make every site compliant and accessible.