Do we need standards?

As late as the year 2000 coding a site to the emerging guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium was practically impossible. Most users were still forced to use browsers from the days when Netscape and Microsoft deliberately issued incompatible products.
Now (in 2002) browsers are more and more alike in their support of standards such as CSS and XHTML. Microsoft and AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape have given up on the “browser wars” under pressure from the W3C and developers.

According to the WaSP’s (Web Standards Project) official estimate, supporting incompatible browsers adds an average 25 percent to the cost of a site and its maintenance. So instead of trying to support multiple versions of the same pages, it is much better to capitalise on the millions of dollars Microsoft, Netscape, Opera, and others have spent building standards-compliant browsers and to code to those universally accepted standards. All these browsers are freely available and few would have good reason not to upgrade.

Sites that do not comply to standards may be relying on bugs instead of features to function and they may not work in the future (and the future is never far away in the world of the Internet). Futhermore by focusing on specific browsers instead of one syntax that works for them all, sites may be denying access to those with alternative Web devices or special technologies, such as aural or braille browsers for the visually impaired.

As the designers of this site, we at Instant Image Access support the Web Standards Project and since the middle of 2002 have tried to ensure that all our new sites are coded to these standards.

If you do not use a browser compatible with these standards you will increasingly find web sites that you visit will look flat and uninteresting and, as DHTML, Style Sheets, XML etc become more prevalent, possibly non-functioning.

Free browser upgrades are available from Browser upgrade

Pages that conform to the standards are allowed to display these icons:

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