"Founded in 1998, The Web Standards Project (WaSP) fights for standards that reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any site published on the Web."
That's from the Web Standards Project site (webstandards.org/). Basically the idea - without getting into total eye-glazing techno-babble - is to author websites using code and techniques that are much easier to update, provide a faster user experience, and are universally usable across different browsers, operating systems, even other devices such as cell phones and PDAs.
Why? Well, it allows for faster changes to a site's content, and to a site's look, which can save a lot of money. The site will download faster. Search engines are said to prefer sites of this type (as they do not have to sort through endless extra code on each page).
Sites written to "web standards" reach the greatest number of folks trying to access a site, be they using hand-held devices, (or other technology we haven't even thought of yet), people with handicaps, and on and on. Web standards can print perfectly formated printer-friendly pages to printers without having to design a whole separate page for printing.
For big corporate sites, often enough bandwidth is saved to save a ton o' money. For most folks that's not as much a factor, but all the other stuff is certainly cool.
I'm not a fanatic nut about this stuff (I figure if something is best designed in the old style of HTML, I'll design it as such). However, I reckon it is the future and so I might as well get my clients situated with sites that will work as well tomorrow as they do today. It's not like it costs more to do..
© 2005-2008 Shaun Wolf Wortis