Working to the W3C standards

W3C standards are the way forwards as web technologies become more and more complex, allowing people to create information which will render correctly the first time, every time, in any anything that supports those standards - this means that more time is available which can be spent working on some of the weaker areas to improve the visitor experience.

A happy visitor may comes back, maybe they spend a little longer looking at your site or maybe they recommend you to a friend, equally an unhappy visitor is unlikely to spend time reading and is even less likely to attempt to make use of whatever services you are offering. Having your site recieve good word of mouth is a type of marketing you cannot buy for love nor money - since this process is viral in that recommendations can pass from one person to another if your site has what it and takes pretty soon you can generate a whole heap of new visitors just by having something that does the task it is supposed to and that people can use without to much difficulty.

Sound good so far?

Background on the organisation

W3C itself stands for world wide web consortium, and their offical website has an entire section dedicated to the background of the organisation and rather than reproducing that content here it seemed smarter to simply link to it and provide you with a summary.

Founded in October 1994, the W3C are essentially an impartial technical standards panel whose role is to assist in the creation and on-going development of standardised technologies and protocols for the internet. In this case protocol refers to application protocols (such as HTTP - the protocol that allows you to view content over the web) rather than transport protocols (such as TCP - the protocol that tells bits of data where they need to go) as transport protocols and beyond are the responsibility of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) who perform a rather similar job to the W3C for the types of protocols they manage.

The work of the W3C takes these protocols from cradle-to-grace and covers many things from hosting conferences in order to discuss topics, creating new ideas and technologies, providing a means to comment on proposed ideas so that the wide variety of people who bother to read these documents can refine them and help spot potential flaws.

Naturally following from this they eventually creating standards based on those ideas and in the process creating a set of basic rules for how the technologies should operate, on the same theme they also upgrade existing standards to ensure that the standards themselves are suitable for the ways people want to use them, and all the while attempting to ensure that the ideas and technologies they are promoting are as open and inter-operable as possible to ensure that they are not creating more problems for themselves in the future.

What are these ideas and technologies they helped create? Well you may have heard of some of them... HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, P3P, XSL, WAP, PNG, DOM, PICS to name but a few.

What you get out of this

Might as well start with a very obvious point - if a page is standards compliant the majority of the browsers which are also standards compliant will render it nearly identically, this means that less time needs to be spent looking at ways to fix markup to make it render correctly. This allows more time to solve real problems or to create additional pages - both of which are things which add to a visitors experience of your site.

Surprisingly simple I know, but a compliant page generally will not break whenever a new version of a browser is released, equally a compliant page will still be able to be accessed by even the most basic browser as it will degrade gracefully enough to allow the content to still be accessible in a reasonably readable format.

Let's not forget pages which render much faster in a visitors browser simply because the page was written in an efficient way - when the browser encounters the page it does not have to attempt to fix any elements, or attempt to render elements which are setting up things like fonts in an inefficient manner.

Standards compliant pages work better with search engines too simply because they are expecting to find pages which follow the rules, if this is what they get then they can process the page as you intended it to be processed rather than their interpretation of it. You also have the added advantage of the accessibility features which add many unseen descriptions and extra text - all of which search engines will include in their indexes.

Also a compliant site can be read by devices other than browsers, meaning that you are creating a site which is accesible to people with various disabilities - not only allowing you a wider audience but potentially saving you time and effort if you are operating in a country which has mandatory accessibility laws as your existing site will quite happily support all your accessibility needs.

Visitors see the benefits too

It is far too easy to forget what your website is supposed to do - provide your visitors with information relating to whatever it is you are attempting to offer them - anything which gets in the way of that goal is a bad thing™ as it takes their attention away from what you are trying to get them to use their limited attention span on.

Being standards compliant helps the users several ways - firstly it makes sure that both the low-end and high-end visitors can enjoy a pleasant experience whilst visiting your site as it does not only support one browser to the detriment of all others - although the latest software will give your visitors the best experience, a standards compliant site by its very nature will degrade gracefully even when unsupported features are encountered.

Secondly since becoming compliant often reduces page-view sizes your visitors may well notice that everything loads a little faster - simple things like this make for a better visitor experience.

Thirdly since a standards compliant site has less need for display plugins etc. the visitor gets a far more seamless trip around your site as the majority of the content will be markup rather than a mix of markup and plugin-generated meaning the site is more accessible, that the pages load faster (since no plugins are required) and you have removed one less requirement for someone to allow someone to usefully visit your site.

It also pays to remember that not every visitor will be using a graphical display, they may have a disability and be using a text-to-voice converter or braille terminal in which case using a standards compliant site will not be another hurdle they have to jump over to actually be able to use your site - just because they may not make up the majority of your visitors does not mean they are not going to be interested.

Getting compliant and staying that way

A large part of the cost in terms of time and effort of being compliant is not actually becoming compliant in the first place but rather staying that way afterwards - the first time around you actually know how long it all will take to do since you know you have N pages to convert and each page takes a certain amount of time to complete.

Once this is over however you will need to keep track of updates and ensure that they are re-validated on a periodic basis as otherwise you risk having to start at the beginning since you do not know which pages are good and which are bad.

Little details do matter

Are you sure you validated everything possible? This is a very valid question simply because a standards compliant site is only as compliant as its weakest part - it wont matter if the pages render if your stylesheets do not work correctly. Many of the elements that make up a page can be validated against the appropriate standard - aside from markup you have CSS, P3P etc. all of which are made considerably less effective when they are not in standards compliant, for what will be no more than a few minutes it seems a waste to overlook a supporting file.

Where to begin

First of all try validating a few of your pages at the w3c validator which should give you some idea of how much work will be involved in updating your pages to achieve standards compliance- this essentially takes a page you specify and attempts to apply a set of rules against it - a perfectly valid page should return no errors, but if your page does have errors then you will see what they are, where they are and why they occured.

The thing about markup is that it's produced by so many applications, not all of which require the user to actually understand the end-result - this could things like Dreamweaver, Word, Lotus, FrontPage or even an online page maker such as those used by geocities - on the other end of the scale you have people like myself who almost get off on the fact that we have hand crafted every page. It is obvious there is no "one size fits all" solution, however there are a few options which are worth looking into...

• The obvious route is always open - learn what the standards expect and allow and then simply hand modify the pages accordingly, this takes time and effort but will produce the best results in the long run as the update process should not lose any of the meaning or overly change the original markup.
• If the original pages were generated by a proprietary piece of software, it may be enough to simply obtain a newer version of that software, load the old pages into it, then save them off - using the software to upgrade the markup in the process. The downside to this approach is that the program which created the original markup may no longer exist, the upgrade cost may be prohibitive or it may not generate compliant markup - these are all things which need investigating.
• If all else fails then you could try an application such as htmltidy which can not only improve the formatting of your markup (making it easier to read and maintain, but also help you validate and in cases where a solution is obvious it will also correct the errors if that is what you tell it to do. The application is free, it was originally written by Dave Raggett and hosted by the W3C but is now being maintained by a group of programmers who are using the sourceforge system to provide a centralised development and download location.

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