Industry and Standards Compliance
One of the regular "hot topics" in the software world, particularly in the realms of
Web Design
and
Web Development
is that of
Web Development
web standards
compliance. Many different bodies publish their own standards, and most companies also enforce their own policies and standards.
At
Mattched IT
, we select a small set of standards which we think are highly relevant and offer significant benefits for our customers, and
then we work hard on ensuring that all our work meets up to these standards. We also use an in-house regime of coding standards,
continuous integration and
unit testing to help ensure the high quality of our work.
Since 1994, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been publishing recommendations and
standards for the web. We currently work to three of these standards, which we feel are the most relevant.
Some of the key benefits of this approach are:
- Improved accessibility - making it easier for all users, (e.g. those who are colour blind, or who use a screen reader) to access the content within each site
- Sites which work better in a wider selection of browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari to name but a few)
- More search engine friendly sites - content is more easily indexed and better search results can be achieved
- Cleaner, more maintainable code to help reduce the cost of future development (and maintenance)
XHTML is an XML implementation of the HTML 4 standard which aims to rise beyond the capabilities within HTML 4 itself. We target either the
XHTML Strict (or when necessary, Transitional) Document Type Definitions (DTDs).
Cascading Style Sheets provide a flexible mechanism to add visual effects and complex layout to (X)HTML documents while also permitting the
developer to separate content and structure from layout and styling. We use the validation services provided by W3C to ensure that we conform
to their recommendations - helping us produce CSS which operates equally in all of the mainstream web browsers.
The Web Accessibility Guidelines published by the W3C's
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) provide a set of rules and regulations for the
implementation of web sites, helping ensure good accessibility throughout.
These include simple points such as always providing alternative text for images and much more - for instance using different visual
indicators to show contextuality - rather than relying on a single one (e.g. colour, which may not be ideal in a situation where a user suffers
from some kind of colour blindness).