Web standards

From 2004, Webthinking have committed to developing websites that adhere to web standards. This includes the use of validated code (where possible) and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layouts.

Standardisation of the commercial World Wide Web is an important issue for the Internet as a whole. Currently, we have many different browsers on many different operating systems with many different devices to view them on (desktop PCs, mobile phones, PDAs etc), and all websites look different on each combination. By adopting standards of authoring, we can make sites 'work', regardless of browser/operating system/device setup the viewer is using.

So why is this important, you may ask? Well, the primary reason is for those viewing pages on non-standard browsers, such as text browsers for the blind. Complicated sites often fail on these, even though business websites are required by law to be accessible by everyone.

Support for these web standards is continually growing, but, whilst IE7 improves on IE6, it still does not follow the guidelines correctly. We endeavour to comply wherever possible on all of our projects.

The current guide to web standards is prodced by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Validated web design code

Part of the role of web standards is to ensure that coding becomes standardised, which, in turn, should make browsers more conformist. Particularly, this refers to HTML and CSS (discussed below). Professional web authors should ensure that their coding validates against the guidelines set out in the web standards. If code does not validate, it may not work across the plethora of browsers available, thus alienating some potential users.

Click here to see the validation of this site's HTML.