Standards compliance in web design
We’ve all seen it. A web page that looks fine in one browser, and jacked up in another. We all know that different browsers render pages differently from one another. Some do a better job than others. The best web pages are the ones that look virtually the same in all browsers, and it didn’t take a lot of hacks and tricks to make that happen.
When you observe the standards set forth by the W3C, (the foremost authority and proponent of web standards) you will see that your pages suddenly have a lot fewer compatibility problems. This is to your benefit, because coding it only once will save you a lot of time. Not having to spend countless hours troubleshooting across multiple browsers is invaluable.
Modern browsers such as Firefox, Opera & Safari follow these standards. Microsoft has always been slow to adopt web standards because they had already developed their own proprietary CSS tags, but they didn’t work in other browsers, only in IE. So you end up with having to create multiple versions of the same page, sniff out the browser, then serve up the proper page. What a pain!
This is why if developers and browser makers can all adopt a set of standards, then the web will be able to advance at an even faster pace than it does now.
To learn more about web standards, check out these links.
http://www.w3.org/
http://www.webstandards.org/
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