Designing Web Sites for Web Standards
Building the Internet on standards rather than certain technology was a good move and has been the foundation on how it has evolved in the past two decades. There are Web standards for how data transfers between computers such as TCP, HTTP and FTP. These are the standards that are not at the top of Web designer's and Web site owner's mind, but there are standards that Web designers and Web site owners should pay close attention to.
The World Wide Web Consortium or W3C is the entity that oversees Web development of Web technologies such as HTML, XML, and CSS and there is a standard for JavaScript known as ECMA. In case you did not know it, the W3C Web site is an enormous and valuable reference for Web designers.
In a perfect world, Web standards would mean that if a Web designer applies Web standards to Web development everything should look and function perfectly. While we do not live in a perfect world, yet, we have grown accustomed to the fact that Web standards are more about how the different Web browsers interpret the standards. The Web browsers are therefore in many ways the standards of today's Web publishing, but the guidelines are in the specifications and every webmaster and Web site owner should aim for perfection in both.
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