We use W3C standards compliant XHTML and CSS to build your website. We also support the mobile web iniative. The reason we do this is because it helps you in many ways. Because your site is not build with nested tables, the old way of doing things, the search engines will rank you higher. Your site will be cheaper and easier to maintain and bulletproof for future changes in the Internet. It will be viewable as the internet moves to mobile phones and PDA devices. It will be less expensive and faster to make update so it doesn't look dated. It will be easier to add and remove content, even if you don't have a web design program. And last of all, it will be in compliance with government recommendations for Accessibility - handicapped visitors with screen readers will be able to access your site in a coherent way.
Historically speaking...
For years web designers have been forced to use tricks and "workarounds" to get pages to work on all browsers. It's a big world out there, and the variety of browsers and computers is extensive. Fortunately, the newest browsers have agreed to adopt a defined set of Internet Standards. Unfortunately, pages that were designed to work for older browsers will not work properly on the newer browsers that use these standards. So, what was a problem, continues to be a problem.
I stay current with the newest Internet Standards, making sure that the content of your site will not only be visible by the majority of browsers in use today, but also all standard compliant browsers of the future.
This constant changing scenario of browser standards has lead to a big problem. The majority of older browsers use propriety HTML, and support Internet standards only partially, and the ones that they do support often do not work correctly. This has meant that for years, instead of web designers being able to build web sites using the correct HTML, they have been forced to use miscellaneous tricks and workarounds to force the noncompliance browsers to display pages correctly. It got to the point that many big web sites would build 3 or 4 different versions of the site just for different browsers, or a web site would give up and just say that they were optimized for a specific browser. You were out of luck if you used anything else.
The difficult thing is that when Web Sites were built using coding specific to specific browsers, and then the browsers themselves would change the game, making everything stop working correctly anyway. When Netscape 6 was released, it made for some really strange situations and many pages were completely unviewable.
Today, most web designers, including myself, try and please everyone - an almost impossible task, but it's getting better as browsers become more uniform and conform to a single standard. This is the bar most clients have requested - so that's why I do my best to make everyone happy. However, the newest browsers account for less than 1% of Internet traffic. It's still a reasonable amount, but is small enough to open up an interesting question. Is it worth focusing on these browsers to the extent that your web site may not work on the newest browsers? I feel we need to look forward toward future compatibility rather than backwards compatibility. I try and please everyone, but when I can't, I choose in favor of the future.
One issue I've found is that though products such as Flash are free and easily downloadable, and included on many browsers, some people don't have them. The same with JavaScript being enabled on a browser. Do we cater to the few that do not have these very important add-ons with dull, static pages, or do we offer opportunities for them to download these additional programs and design for the 95% majority that have them enabled? Personally, I'd vote for the latter only because as surfers get more net-savvy they will want a more interactive experience. And net-savvy customers are the ones that do most of the buying on e-commerce sites anyway.
When possible, build a standards compliant and accessible site
The benefits of using standard compliant design are important:
- Any browser on any platform can access the content of the site without serious error messages (this includes talking browsers for the visually impaired)
- Standards compliant sites use much less code and graphics so they are much smaller and download much faster!
- The content of the site is separate from the design.
- Your designer worries less about cross browser issues, and focuses time and energy on building you a better web site.
- Your site is future-proofed as much as possible. You know that your site will work on all the latest standard complaint browsers.
Unfortunately not all features are compliant - but it's getting better. We always try to build your site the most efficient, browser friendly way possible and do our best to "future proof" it.