An Introduction to Web Standards

Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."

--Tim Berners-Lee, Technology Review, 1996

Web standards grew out of one of the most aggressive web-related marketing campaigns ever seen. Probably very few will be surprised to find we're talking about Microsoft, whose ruthless marketing-tactics (proved illegal in the case brought by a United States Department of Justice) have meant that over 90% of internet users surf with Internet Explorer. This is in comparison to previous years when browsers like Netscape Navigator (remember that?) dominated the market.

On the whole, this has meant that web designers have become lazy. With so many people using IE, designers could build pages that were IE compliant, and leave it at that. Everyone uses Microsoft's browser, so why bother supporting anything else?

The simple answer? Because 90%, or over 90%, does not mean everyone.

Picture the scene: you tell your boss that the brand-spanking-new, multimedia-enabled, database-driven site that you've created cannot be accessed properly by one in ten web-users. (Stop. Think about that a second. One in ten.) Not very nice, is it?

Traditional ways of overcoming this problem - such as supplying 'browser-specific' versions of pages - are inefficient and difficult in today's market, when there are dozens of browsers to choose from.

So, Web standards were introduced. The Web Standards are a simple set of design regulations enforced by the W3 Consortium. If these regulations are followed by web-designers, they ensure the creation of cross-browser compatible web-pages.

Basically, abiding by the standards set by the W3C ensures that anyone surfing into your site will be able to view it properly, irrespective of the browser they're using.

We've also got to consider the recent drive to make portable devices such as mobiles and palmtops web-enabled. Web standards ensure that future technologies such as these will be able to view your pages.

100%, anyone?

[To see why Web Standards are important (in just seven points) click here.]

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