My Adventures with Standards Compliance
I've finally done it! I made a commercial website that fully complies to the W3C standards!
OxfordTours.com uses xHTML for its contents, and CSS to style the pages. And its all compliant. OK, so its quite a simple site, but its a step forward for me.
So What?
Why is this such a big thing? Well for ages web designers and developers (myself included) have been writing websites that completely ignore the standards, are completely inaccessible to the disabled, and fall apart on older (and in some cases newer) browsers. But things are changing.
Basically:
- If you want your site to be future proof, write your site to be standards compliant! The browsers of the future will continue to use these standards, but will become less and less forgiving of non-standard code.
- If you want it to be more accessible, and you want it to work on older browsers, and things like PDA's, WAP phones and other devices that don't have the latest version of Internet Explorer on them, write the content in xHTML and lay it out using CSS.
OK, I'm sold on the idea - How do I do it then?
There are literally hundreds of resources for learning CSS out there, but here are some that were very helpful to me:
- Alistapart - An online magazine for web developers has a number of very good articles on CSS and standards compliance.
- CSS-Discuss is a mailing list devoted to the discussion of CSS, funnily enough. Its home to a lot of CSS gurus, who will be more than happy to help out newbies. They were happy to help me anyway :-) You might also like to check out their archives aswell, as you questions might already have been answered.
- glish.com/css/ is a fantastic resource put together by Eric Costello, housing some fantastic CSS-templates to take and learn from, and a selection of tutorials to play with, amongst other things.
- WaSP - The Web Standards Project is a bunch of people who persuaded Netscape and Microsoft to make their browsers Standards Compliant. Then they managed to get Macromedia to make Dreamweaver MX standards compliant.And now they are turning their attention to you, the web designer/developer!
- Evolt.org - In their words "Evolt.org is a world community for web developers, promoting the mutual free exchange of ideas, skills and experiences", which sums it up nicely.
- CSS/Edge - Eric Meyer (Netscape's standards evangelist) pushes the boundaries to see just whats possible with CSS.
Theres loads more, but I found that the best way to learn was simply to dive in headfirst and experiment. If you get stuck, ask the gurus, or look it up on Google. Good Luck!
My CSS explorations will continue with more and more adventurous designs, and i'm going to work more on accessibility too. Off to Bobby I go then..."