calderwood

In Ten Reasons to Learn and Use Web Standards, Roger Johanssen provides great reasons for using web standards.  In my own endeavors, reasons 5-8 seem the most important: I want to make my site accessible, improve its search engine rankings, make it easy to maintain, and ensure its future sustainability.

All this begs the question: What exactly are web standards?  After reading Chapter 4 of Digital History (”Designing for the History Web”), I have a sense of what separates good web design from bad.  (As I understand it, it all comes down to making a site as accessible, its content as apparent, and it structure as transparent as possible.)  Still, understanding the effects of good web design is not the same as knowing the standards for good web design.

Fortunately, I have an inkling of what web standards are after following the link from Roger Johanssen’s list to Dave Shea’s A Roadmap to Standards.  Apparently, following web standards means making a website’s code as readable as possible.  It involves consistently closing elements, as well as using techniques like CSS to separate code regarding a site’s presentation from code regarding its content.

These are practices I hope to implement as I design my own website. 

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.