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1: Introduction to The Web Standards Curriculum/Table of Cont...

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Web Standards Curriculum, a course designed to give anyone a solid grounding in web design/development, no matter who they are—it is completely free to use, accessible, and assumes no previous knowledge.

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Why web standards?

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Efficiency of code: As you’ll learn throughout the course, a lot of best practice web standards usage is all about reusing code—you can separate your HTML content from your stylistic (CSS) and behavioural (JavaScript) information, allowing your file sizes to be kept small, and code to be written only once, and then reused wherever it is needed.

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Efficiency of code:

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Ease of maintenance: This follows closely on from the last point—if you can write HTML only once, and then apply styles and behaviour wherever they are needed using classes and functions, then if you need to change something at a later date, you can just make the change in one place and it propagates throughout the entire web site, rather than having to specify that change everywhere that it is needed!

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Ease of maintenance:

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Accessibility: The next two points are closely related—one of the big issues on the Web is making web sites accessible to everyone, no matter who they are, regardless of circumstance. This includes making web sites usable by people with disabilities such as blindness/visual impairment and motor impairment (ie, people who have restricted movement, and might not be able to use their hands properly, or at all). By using web standards and best practices, you’ll be able to make your web sites usable by this significant group of the web audience with no extra effort.

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Accessibility:

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Device compatibility: by this, I mean ensuring that your web sites will work not only across different platforms—ie Windows, Mac, Linux—but also alternative browsing devices, which these days can include mobile phones, TVs and games consoles. These devices have limitations such as screen size, processing power, control mechanisms available and more, but the good news is that again, using web standards and best practices, you can pretty much guarantee that your web sites will work on most of these devices. There are more mobile phones in the world than PCs, a lot of which are Internet–capable, so can you or your clients afford to miss out on this market? For more on mobile web development, check out some of the dedicated articles on dev.opera.com.

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Device compatibility:

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Web crawlers/search engines: By this, we are talking about what is termed search engine optimization—the practice of making your web sites as visible as possible to the so–called web crawlers that trawl the web and index web sites, and therefore giving you better search rankings on sites such as Google. There is a science to this (see SEO articles such as Intelligent site structure for better SEO! and Semantic HTML and Search Engine Optimization) but yet again, just by using web standards you will make your site a lot more visible on Google, Yahoo!, etc., which is good for business.

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Web crawlers/search engines:

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just by using web standards you will make your site a lot more visible on Google, Yahoo!, etc.

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most sites on the Web still do not follow web standards, and many web developers working today still use bad, outdated practices. “Why?” You ask.

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Lack of education:

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Company policy:

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“I don’t need to learn them!”:

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It will also make your skillset more future–proof, and make you capable of earning more. A lot of companies are requesting skills in web standards these days.

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“It’s too hard to learn!”:

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Standards support in browsers:

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modern browsers all have decent web standards support

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by using modern best practices, you can ensure that users of those browsers will still have a reasonable user experience.

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They used to write JavaScript that generated menus etc on the fly (no good for people with JavaScript disabled in their browsers, or people with visual impairments using screenreaders, which get confused by such JavaScript)

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