Cherish

I would like to discuss today what according to you are web standards?

• Is is all about validation? If W3C validator validates your page then is your coding proper and correct?
• Is it all about use of proper syntax and semantics?
• Is it all about separating the structure ([X]HTML), presentation(CSS) and behavior(JavaScript) ?
• What it is all about?

Mike Davidson answers like this :

It’s just a reminder that web standards are about a lot more than validation. Web standards are about all the processes involved in publishing information over IP. If you have a big red button at your company that employees press to make their pages live, that’s a standard. It’s your own strange and puzzling standard, but it’s a standard. If someone is going to work at your company, they need to learn how to push the big red button to publish their pages.

So how do we pick what standards to follow when we’re publishing on the web? If we pick standards that nobody else practices or recognizes, the benefit of the standard is limited to our own little world.

Who can we look to for guidance?

First we look to the W3C. We don’t look to them because they have any authority. We don’t look to them because we have to. We look to them because their very charge is to help us and their existence is for our benefit. They are not owned by Microsoft and they are not paid by the NRA.

W3C specifications are usually (but not always) detailed and well-thought out. They give us sets of tags with which to classify our data. They give us proper syntax with which to use these tags. They give us methods of styling our information with external stylesheets. And finally, they give us the ability to add intelligent behavior to our content using the document object model.
After a several days of studying, some people could get a rough handle on the above methods. After several weeks, the same people could probably claim they have intermediate web skills. And after several months, these individuals might have more web skills than anyone in their neighborhood.

So what have these people learned sitting in the closet with their laptop and their O’Reilly book? How to deal with deadlines and workplace personalities? How to integrate art, editorial, and marketing? What web publishing is all about?
Not at all.

They’ve merely learned the building blocks of deploying 0’s and 1’s on the web. That may sound insignificant, but it’s not. It’s more than 99% of the world knows, and probably a good amount of the entire code-writing profession.

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