These days when 70-80% of the business is generated online, it is necessary to have a globally accessible website i.e, it should be accessible across all major browsers, operating systems and other devices like PDA, phone etc.With over 100+ combination of browser/OS, it becomes more necessary than ever to follow web standards while coding the website.
In this article, we will discuss about the advantages of following web standards.
Web standards: Web standard is a general term for the formal standard and other technical specification, established by the W3C and other standard bodies.
W3C: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international industry consortium dedicated to “leading the Web to its full potential”. It’s headed d by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.
Advantages of web standards:
1. Consistent Look and Feel: All styles are defined separately in a central CSS file. Separation of style from the content enables to give a consistent look and feel to the website.
2. 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 and achieve better ranking.
3. Easy to maintain: Having all the styles defined in single CSS file makes the maintenance easy. It eliminates the tedious job of making same changes on each and every page. It is easy to understand the semantic and structured code even though created by some one else.
4. 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.
5. Accessible to different devices: Semantic HTML, where structure is separated from presentation, makes it easy to interpret the content on different devices like cell phones, PDA, screen reader.
6. Minimal bandwidth requirement: Clean, structured code with all presentation elements in single file, helps in decreasing the file size and results in quicker downloads.
Using Standard compliant code, one can make sure that the code is properly structured and semantically coded. It is easy to manage and make changes in well formatted website.
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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