Website Anatomy
Who are the W3C?
The Worldwide Web Consortium is an international organisation, set up to develop and regulate web standards. There are many different operating systems, web browsers and devices available to view web pages and the number is constantly growing. Websites developed using W3C guidelines and passing their validation tests are much more likely to be read by all these various web browsing methods.
Markup Languages
You may of heard about XML - or Extensible Markup Language, HTML - Hypertext Markup Language and even SGML - Standard Generalised Markup Language. These are all languages developed to display data, which could be text, images, tables of data etc.
Websites have been developed using HTML for many years. Sections of information on a webpage are marked by tags which define what sort of data the sections hold. For example a paragraph of data would be written in an HTML document using the <p> tag:
<p>This is a paragraph of data</p>
Various heading tags are also available:
<h1>Largest Heading</h1>
<h2>Next Size Heading</h2>
Browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox use these tags to format the data within them for display. Unfortunately HTML is a very 'loosely interpreted' language and doesn't mind if tags are closed, and allows all sorts of bad coding practices to go unpunished. These coding errors may not be important for users using Internet Explorer, but may render the document unreadable to users with handheld devices, visually impaired visitors using screen readers or other devices and browsers.
By adhering to the W3C standards and submitting all our pages to their validation we make sure that our sites don't fall into this trap.
XML
XML is a fairly recent development in markup languages allowing user definable tags to be embedded in documents, This means that instead of being restricted to the fixed set of HTML tags we can set up our very own definitions within our data. XML is being used to transfer data from databases to other applications, import and export data from electronic forms and to store application data and settings.
XHTML
XHTML is the W3C version of HTML used to display data on the web. XML is a data definition language where XHTML is a data formatting and display language.
We design our websites using XHTML to ensure that they are future proofed and adaptable. HTML development has ended, there won't be an HTML 5 - but XHTML is the way forward, we believe.
According to the W3C:
XHTML 1.0 is the first major change to HTML since HTML 4.0 was released in 1997. It brings the rigor of XML to Web pages and is the keystone in W3C's work to create standards that provide richer Web pages on an ever increasing range of browser platforms including cell phones, televisions, cars, wallet sized wireless communicators, kiosks, and desktops.
Google And W3C Validation
Hardington Consultancy are primarily concerned with developing our clients presence on the Web. Like it or not, this means that your site must be ranked highly by Google and other search engines. Although Google will never reveal their ranking algorithms, we are convinced that Google value W3C validated sites higher than non-validated sites. Google are always looking for ways to improve the quality of their listings, correctly coded and validating sites are an obvious way for them to do this.