Standards is a topic that not many people consider when designing a web site. You may be asking what are "standards"? Standard is defined as "something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality". Let's look at an example to best understand standards and why they are needed.
An example that everyone can understand is electric receptacles on the walls of your apartment or house. Every house in the USA has the same kind of receptacle. If you buy an small electrical device, like a radio or food blender, you are confident that you will be able to plug it into any power receptacle in your house. The receptacle and plug are a standard.
Now, imagine if the power receptacles were different from one manufacturer to another. What if a plug from G.E. was different from the standard? What if the manufacturer of your home's power receptacles were only compatible with electrical devices from Sony? You'd have to know what kind of receptacles your had and what type of power cable you had, and only then could you buy an adapter. Unecessarily complicated, huh?
All is simple when it comes to electrical appliances. Unfortunately, this isn't the case with the world wide web and web browsers.
When it comes to producing web pages, not all browsers (the
program you use to look at web pages) follow the standard. The
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the
industry organization that establishes the standard. The current standard is
the HTML 4.01 standard. HTML,
HyperText Markup Language, is the language that all web pages are written in.
It tells the browser how layout the page, which graphics to use and where, and
what colors to use.
Well, not all browsers support the HTML 4.01 standard. The most popular browser is currently Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Windows, but it only partially supports the standard. As of this writing, 95% of the WWW traffic was using Internet Explorer (IE), so many web designers forego writing their web pages to the W3C standard and write the page so it looks good in IE and never test on the other browsers. This may mean that these web sites may come out looking poorly on the other browsers, or not even work. Are you willing to lose 5% of your visitors because your site isn't written to the industry standards?
We didn't think so, and we aren't willing to create sites that don't conform to the W3C HTML4 standard or the latest revision. Netscape Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer both weakly support the HTML 4 standard. Better choices include the Opera browser and browsers built from the Mozilla project, like Netscape 6/7 and Mozilla Firebird.
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Why are we so adamant about this subject? We believe that the WWW is for everyone, irregardless of what type of computer and browser you prefer to use. If you are going to put together a web site, or pay someone to do it, why not reach the largest audience? 5% of the people on the Internet is a large number and throwing their business to your competitor is not a good return on your investment.
So rest assured, Tuna Can web sites will conform to the W3C standards. We also test our sites on many different browsers and on many different platforms.
