The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standards bodies have established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies are called “web standards”, and they are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users.
BENEFITS OF DESIGNING WITH WEB STANDARDS
Designing a site with web standards:
- simplifies and lowers the cost of production because the site will require far less code, the pages will download quicker, the code is easier to maintain, and the bandwidth requirements are significantly reduced;
- delivers sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices;
- sites developed according web standards will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve and as new Internet devices come to market
- search engine optimization will occur with standards based sites; and
- legal accessibility requirements can be met.
WEB STANDARDS REFERENCES
Clients and Web Technologists should develop sites according to the following standards:
- Structural and Semantic Languages
- Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 4.01
- Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) 1.0
- Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0
- Presentation Languages
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) level 1
- CSS level 2 revision 1
- CSS level 3
- Object Models
- Document Object Model (DOM) level 1
- DOM Level 2 (HTML, Core, Events, Traversal)
- DOM Level 3 (Core)
- Scripting Languages
- ECMAScript 262 (the standard version of JavaScript)
Implementations For Advanced Browsers:
- Extensions and updates to HTML4 and XHTML 1.0
- Microformats
- Web Applications 1.0 (AKA “HTML5″)
- XHTML 1.1
- Additional Markup Languages
- Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) 1.01
- MathML 2.0
Using these resources should help clients and web developers develop sites that are accessible in today’s browsers and devices and that will remain so as browsers and devices quickly evolve.
The Standards for the Web by MainHeading, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.