I spend a significant amount of my working time on forums that discuss web technologies, best practices, marketing and the like. I come into contact with a large cross-section of the web community and am sometimes in awe of people’s knowledge and creations, whilst at other times am disgusted that they exist in the same industry as me.
What really gets my goat are the people that claim to be web developers yet carry no regard for web standards. The type of people that still rely on Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG editing and table based layouts. The type that don’t look beyond the surface of a website and pay no attention to its usability, accessibility or technical build.
Fundamentally web standards exist for a reason; to unify things on the web. If these standards do not get paid attention to in the early stages of development, the ongoing development of the site may be compromised, let alone the browser compatibility. Developers need to pay attention to standards in order to pass validation tests and provide their users with a greater experience.
Adhering to web standards helps create unification across browsing platforms, because eventually compatibility will be widespread (even if it is not currently)
Tests have proven that Google prefers W3C valid pages to mucky table based ones
Pages load quicker when lightweight technologies are used
You will earn respect from your fellow designers – which is more important than you may think!
It really will help development in both the short and long term – properly marking up your documents and separating design from content is definitely the way to go
You can utilise CSS properties more expertly to enhance the look and feel of your site
If you adhere to web standards including building your pages using valid XHTML you can submit your site to CSS galleries which will increase traffic and backlinks
You can check if a designer is worth their salt by analysing their markup and checking their page against the W3C validation – if it passes there’s a good chance that some care has been taken in the construction of the pages but if it doesn’t, it could cause issues down the line. Best practice is to adhere to the standards set out by the W3C which can be found detailed in-depth on their website. As a hobbyist or a professional, you’ll do well to keep abreast of these developments and you career path will lead to much more success.
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