Not all guidelines are meant to be restrictive. Quality standards, the guidelines for web development, are meant to establish a semblance of uniformity in all web services delivered.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
Need for Standard
Issued by W3C, Quality Standards stipulate the various parameters any web development service/product must match up to, to be considered up-to-the-mark The Internet today is a beehive of all sorts of web services. Some are good, some are top-of-the-line, and some are a waste of time.
Quality standards aim to eliminate this discrepancy by promoting researched standards so that all web products and services are user-friendly and make good sense to invest in.
Web designers and developers are humans, which means their work reflects their viewpoints to varying extents. These viewpoints can be broadly classified under:
Scripting of Websites
Using XHTML standards
XHTML is an extension of HTML that is cleaner and leaner. It allows websites to be viewed on various devices (mobile phones etc.) which was not easy with HTML.
All the modern web browsers have the support for both CSS 1 and CSS 2 standards.
Using CSS will do improve the quality of the web site and increases the readability
for many of the different browsers. It will also do greatly reduce a web site
development osts..
The Web Validation
Web validator is a software program which can do check the web pages against a web
standards. When you use the validator to check an HTML, XHTML or CSS document, the
validator will return the list of any errors which were found , according to the
chosen standard. Normally a validator will also returns the line numbers where
errors is found. Make sure to make it a habit to validate all the web pages before the
publishing them.
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
WAI stands for "Web Accessibility Initiative", and is an initiated by W3C.
WAI coordinates with the organizations around the world to increase the accessibility of
the Internet through is the six primary areas of work: the technology, guidelines, tools,
research, education and the development.
You can improve quality of the web site, and make information available to
more and more people (and the browsers) by writing the web pages according to the WAI
guidelines. You will learn more about the WAI in the later chapter of this tutorial.
