Web Standards
Web Standards: An Introduction
For more information, contact Eliot Spindel
Eliot
Spindel is the webmaster for The
Sierra Group, Inc.. Eliot is knowledgeable on issues relating to web
accessibility and standards.
You may be asking yourself, "what do the icons at the bottom of the left column mean?" They indicate that the website meets certain Web standards for design and accessibility. Alas, you ask, "what are web standards?"
In order to answer that question properly, we need to go back to the early 1990s. As the World Wide Web and specifically the Internet, have evolved, there became a need to establish a set of web standards. The software and hardware often were proprietary and users were receiving different results in their Web surfing, depending on the software and hardware that they used. In 1994, the Tim Berners-Lee and others created the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international consortium to develop Web standards and protocols.
Since 1994, industry manufacturers and developers have been slow to adopt the standards and guidelines, and to this day, there are still many incompatibilities, especially in browsers, assistive technology and software, which causes problems for website developers. Some modern browsers like Mozilla Firefox are standards compliant, while different versions of Internet Explorer are not. This causes Web designers to have to implement "workarounds" or "hacks" in their code to make your Web pages display and work properly in the different browsers.
Of interest to web designers, are the web design standards dealing with accessibility, hypertext markup language (HTML) and other web programming languages, and cascading style sheets (CSS), which allows for the separation of content and styling.
In future articles, I will explore Web standards further and how they help or hinder Web designers and users. Please direct questions to Eliot Spindel
In
the decade and a half since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed,
life has improved for many of this country’s 54 million disabled citizens.
But the landmark legislation can be seen as “both a tool and a sword.” That’s
the view of Janet Fiore, CEO of Sierra Group 
