Web standards are the protocol that top designers, developers and their employers live by. The many practical benefits of adopting Web standards are overwhelmingly in your favor, especially if Findability is important to your site.

First, a little history of Web standards.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee established the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994, consisting of an international counsel of Web experts whose purpose was to champion best practices for creating Web content. Some languages supported by the W3C are HTML, CSS, JavaScript and XML.

1998 marked the formation of the Web Standards Project, whose charge was to inspire some real change on the Web by educating developers and designers alike about the benefits of adopting Web standards.

The CSS Zen Garden also aided in quashing myths that standards-based design was unattractive.

So, for those that weren’t around when the Web was invented, it’s initial intent was a platform for scientists and researchers to publish and share their research documents, using HTML. As you can imagine, not too pretty and far from the moving graphics and interactive interfaces that we now are accustomed to. In the 1990s the W3C decided to take the power back and revamp HTML, resulting in XHTML. (XHTML is HTML rebuilt using XML to define it’s structure.) This is great for designers and developers everywhere because XHTML happily accommodates improvement and development of new tags and attributes.

The benefits of using Web standards to developers, designers, end-users and businesses are overwhelming, but the most persuasive argument can be found in our friend Findability. Using Web standards will help optimize sites for search engines and will generate more traffic on your site!

Proposed design for the Nashville Cares Aids Walk in Nashville, TN.