Web Standards
How Websites Work
A website’s creator uses a certain piece of code, and the visitor’s web browser software interprets that code to display the website in a certain way. In theory, a website should appear the same to every visitor.
The Need for Standards
In the early days of the public internet, however, commercial pressures led the various web browser companies to offer their own types of proprietory code, each incompatible with that of the other browsers. Web designers could achieve certain effects only in particular browsers, and were forced to create two or three versions of each website in order to make the site work in all of the available browsers. The inefficiency of this was obvious, and led to standardisation both of the code that went into websites and the interpretation of that code by browsers.
Web browsers are complex pieces of software, and the language of the web standards specifications is frequently obscure and imprecise. Inevitably, browsers differ in the way they display the details of web pages. Browsers that adhere to web standards will, however, display all of the essential aspects of a modern website consistently.
Browsers are rapidly improving their adherence to standards now that all the browser manufacturers (even Microsoft!) are securely on the standards bandwagon.
The Benefits of Standards
Websites made with web standards have fundamental advantages over incompetently–designed websites:
- They require far less code, which means that pages download more quickly.
- The code is easier to maintain, which makes updates and changes cheaper for the website’s owner.
- The website will work in all browsers, both now and in the future.
Websites that do not abide by standards, however, that are coded to cope with the peculiar behaviour of delinquent browsers, are guaranteed to break at some point in the future, as browsers implement the standards more exactly.
Our Guarantee
It is impossible to create an attractive, functional website that will appear absolutely identically in all browsers. We guarantee that our websites will abide by web standards, and that our websites will therefore appear correctly in all modern browsers which comply with those standards. We will do our best to cope with the imperfections of older browsers and of those browsers that do not comply with web standards.
We will not, however, guarantee that our websites will behave correctly in browsers which require proprietory, non–standard, code. For the technically–minded, this includes any browser which requires a X–UA7–Compatible HTTP header or meta tag. If you specifically require your website to appear in a certain way in a certain browser, you must make this clear before work starts.
Further Information
- See our Varieties of Web Browsers page for more information about browsers.
- Websites built with web standards have huge accessibility benefits, both to people and to search engines.
- Cowboy web designers tend not to care, or even know, about web standards.
- Find out more about web standards at the Web Standards Project.