Does your website look different on different browsers? Does it take a lot of time to make even a small change on your website? Do you have bandwidth concern? Does your website takes lot of time to load?

The solution for any of the above mentioned issues is “Web Standard compliant website“.

Founded in 1998, web standard is a general term for the formal standard and other technical specification, established by W3C and other standard bodies. Their aim is to increase the accessibility of web pages.

Why use web standards?
Using web standards improve the accessibility of the websites, reduce development and maintenance time, improve search engine rankings and can also improve accessibility.

This is why it is always advisable to follow standards based approach while developing a website.

1. Separation of Content and presentation:
In standard-based approach, XHTML is used for content, structure and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) for presentation. Separating content and presentation improves the accessibility of the webs pages across browsers and Operating system.

2. Improved efficiency:
By separating content and presentation, we reduce page weight, which in turn results into lower bandwidth costs.

3. Lower site maintenance cost:
Having all the styles defined in single CSS file makes the maintenance easy. It is easy to understand the semantic and structured code even though created by some one else.

4. Consistent Look and Feel:
All styles are defined separately in a central CSS file. Separation of style from the content gives a consistent look and feel to the website.

5. Increased Accessibility:
Standard based websites work well with assistive devices including screen-reader or Braille terminals.

6. Cross browser compatible:
Writing clean code that conforms to the W3C standards will give consistent results across all browser platforms. Major browsers include – IE6, IE7, Safari, firefox (Windows and Mac), Opera.

7. Non-Desktop Browser Compatibility:
Separating content and presentation, makes it easy to build custom style sheets for non-desktop browsers. Its easy to define separate CSS for mobile, PDAs, Print etc.

8. Improved search engine ranking:
CSS driven website helps in improving content to code ration by removing junk code. This improves the structural organization of the code, thereby improving its readability. Using optimized content rich code makes it easy for the search engine to index it more accurately which results in better ranking

Conclusion:
In nutshell, standard based websites are more accessible across all browsers, operating systems and different devices. They use low bandwidth and perform well in search engines.

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