We do need web design standards.

So what are the web standards and why do they matter? The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994 and works to develop web standards and guidelines.

The director of the W3C is Tim Berners-Lee, who invented of the World Wide Web. It is an international organisation that defines and publishes open standards for web languages and protocols, for example, accessibility, XHMTL and CSS are current recognised standards.

Designing and developing websites accessible to disabled users is now a legal requirement in both the US and the UK. XHMTL 1.0 and CSS 2.0 are W3C published standards that are now supported by all the popular browsers and many web designers are coding their sites to be compliant.

So, just apart from the web pages being displayed correctly in all modern browsers, websites coded to XMTML and using CSS (Cascaded Style Sheets) are more likely to rank better in the search engines.

This is because the web page contains less code, so your on-topic content and keywords appear earlier on the page and are more prominent. The google search engine ‘bots’ do have to wade through tons of superfluous code to get to the relevent content, because the presentation and postioning code is all in a CSS style sheet, which is separate from the web page.

And by adhering to the coding standards, a website is much easy to edit and maintain too. XHML tightens up the use of tags compared to HTML so you don’t get slightly different results with different browsers and CSS is a more powerful and flexible tool for presentation of your webpage.

So I think we do need web standards because they help everyone, but what do you think? What are your views?…