Web Standards and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Standards help us build things to a well known expectation that is unambiguous. This doesn't apply to just the internet and web development. There are standards for many things we use every day like the thread on a bolt or the size of a screw, refining ore, or the noise output of speakers etc...
There was a time, not too far in the past, where standards in web development were laughed at and everyone used Internet Explorer. Back in those days there was a mentality of either it works in Internet Explorer and it is good, or it doesn't work in Internet Explorer and it's bad and that anything not adhering to Microsoft's ideas and implementation was shunned. It took time for some people to come round to see the benefits of standards based development, but now the wind has changed.
With the web standards revolution people started seeing the benefit of listening to the W3C's guidelines and moving on with their recommendations. We now have real competition in the browser department with the release of Firefox and developers have bombarded Microsoft with requests to make Internet Explorer standards compliant.
Not only does it give us a consistent approach to building web sites, it help software vendors produce better software that gives expected results, making more competition and give us more choices.
When Singular builds a website, it is built on strong concepts, vast experience and always adheres to current web standards. XHTML is used in place of HTML and we use Cascading Style Sheets extensively for presentation. We don't waste your time, or ours, for that matter on catering for obscure features that aren't readily available to all.
Keys to good web development
- Focus on content and use semantic XHTML to create documents that can be viewed, unstyled, on the web
- Use CSS to style those documents and apply design and themes
- Use Javascript unobtrusively to add flair or behavioural functionality in desired. Degrade gracefully when browsers don't support it
