Why standards matter
Despite their looks, not all websites are well designed beneath the surface. That's why it's important to entrust the job to experts.
The internet has developed so rapidly — at times chaotically — in recent years that many designers have resorted to devising complex techniques to making their web pages look good. Such techniques frequently fail to conform to the latest standards set down by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C).
- The result — pages that are slow to load, difficult to maintain, and which usually deny people with disabilities access to the information contained within the website.
All websites designed by Japan Interface comply with the W3C's latest standards — HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0. They also make full use of Cascading Style Sheets.
This makes sites easier (and therefore cheaper) to maintain, as well as making sure they will continue to work satisfactorily even when new versions of web browsers are released.
What the standards mean
Without getting too technical, many websites place heavy reliance on what is known as structural mark-up — instructions to the computer about the size and colour of letters, and complex tables used to create the overall structure of the page. The result can be stunning, but it's time-consuming to build — and a small change to the page can bring the whole structure tumbling down.
The W3C standards separate content from structure, making websites far more accessible to people with disabilities. Blind people can now surf the web using screen readers that read the pages aloud through synthesized speech, but sites that heavy reliance on structural mark-up pose formidable barriers to such assistive technologies.
Building accessible websites is not an expensive luxury — properly planned, it need cost no more than an ordinary site. Failure to make your site as reasonably accessible to the disabled as possible could lay your organization open to legal challenges — as the Organizing Committee of the Sydney Olympics found to its great cost, when it was fined $20,000 for discriminating against a blind person.
