Thanks for the useful post ladynred. This thread will benifit all the newbies.

Well formed and validated websites will also have an impact on SEO. It's obviously not a "make or break" but as we all know every little bit helps!

In my opinion, web standards are guide for an efficient way to create a website to be able to preempt unnecessary errors and faults in the website.

Yes,very good stuff!
Thanks!

I had a hard tme converting all my sites to xhtml and css, but I had to do it because the w3c validator showed a lot of errors on my site

Web standards are definitely important, because it will help search engines to crawl your pages better

quality

Has anyone ever actually tried this other than me? This is acid2
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...ne=1&verbose=1
Needs a char type listed, some browsers trigger quirks without it.
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/v...usermedium=all
INVALID CSS!
The still in progress acid3, valid coding, invalid CSS
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/v...usermedium=all
The tests to make sure web browsers display the standards correctly aren't using the standards, so since Opera displays it how they ask it to be displayed it is actually breaking the standards somewhere.

nice links
thank you very much for the info.
nice

One such standard is w3c .You can check your website on w3c.org and it will tell you what changes you need to make to make it w3c certified website.It will help you in getting better position in search engines .Also it would help to make your website browser independent ie; your website will look exactly the same on every browser once it is w3c validated .

your website will look exactly the same on every browser once it is w3c validated .

Not necessarily, you can have a perfectly valid site and still have a mess cross-browser. There's a LOT more to web standards than just the W3C.

W3c is just a component of web standards which is a larger term ,as far as browser thing is concerned you can check for yourself, once you validate a page on w3c it would look same on every browser ,atleast this is what i have seen.

once you validate a page on w3c it would look same on every browser

Then what you've seen is very limited, because it's simply not true.

Yeah this is always something we should talk up on. For instance.. I always did a break as this:

<br>

But a few months ago I realised it wasn't correct code, so I changed almost all my sites code to:

<br />

The reason for this is because the normal break code doesn't have a end tag so its not valid. By adding the / we make the code valid.

I know this is pretty simple, but it's a perfect example.

- Joby.

The closing on tags like that is only necessary if you're using the XHTML doctype.

Oh really? I was teaching the basics of HTML to someone, the other day and it said on a learning website that the closing tag was needed.

****, I think I just wasted my time.. Lol

I think I just wasted my time.. Lol

Nope, because you just learned something.

You might want to read up on the differences between HTML and XHTML doctypes:

http://htmlfixit.com/tutes/tutorial_...ferences.shtml

http://24ways.org/2005/transitional-vs-strict-markup

This is one excellent post. This is really going to my bookmarks. Anyway, Web Standards are very important for many different reasons. Only if you have understood the basics can you move on to the more "expert" fields in web dev and search marketing.

Wow pretty much all of these links are key when making a new website, these are very useful.

The interesting thing about "standards" in the programming world is that it they often look and smell like an opinion. So I've been doing this whole thing a while, and I've mostly worked on web sites that take on an "application" like appearence.

I can appreciate the viewpoint that tables are for tabular data... obviously that makes perfect sense.. I mean who would want to div out a databound grid with paging and sorting? no one, thats who..

But table layout isnt about using all tables and no CSS.. I mean I think you know this.. its about framing a website area into an EASY to position template.. that can be styled up the ying tang with CSS still, but without all that hassle of floating and absolute positioning.

So please tell me again, exactly what is so bad about table layout.. It works in all browsers still, if im going mobile or printer, I detect and swap that out anyway with a different template..

So phrases like "yeah tables are out" and "its bad for the search engine". They dont really tell me much. They tell me your opinion on coding style, and what works for you. If it really is bad for the search engine, show me the money.. show me something from Google that says "our spiders dont crawl table structures".

You might think this a flame or attack but its not, im really interested in WHY I must struggle to position element A B and C where I want to be using something other than what naturally works best.. table frame layout combined with CSS.

Im a very pragmatic type of guy, Im no zealot for any company or technology by any means.. I do what works, and what works the best and fastest for a situation. But it just seems to me like when most people on this lovely interweb talk about web coding standards, they are in fact really talking about doing something opposite of Internet Explorer.