ForeSite is your team of designers, developers, and computer consultants for technology support, web development and network repair in the Hartford, CT and Worcester, MA areas.
One of the important maxims of computer programming is:
Be conservative in what you produce; be liberal in what you accept.
Browsers follow the second half of this maxim by accepting Web pages and trying to display them even if the code that defines the page is poorly written. Usually this means that the browser will try to make educated guesses about what the Web developer probably meant. The problem is that different browsers (or even different versions of the same browser) will make different guesses about the same illegal construct; worse, if the coder completly disregards standards, the browser could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash.
Poor coding can also hurt the chances for a page being properly parsed by popular search engines.
To avoid these problems, your Web developer should follow the first half of the maxim and make sure that pages are written with standardized code.
As of January 1, 2005 ForeSite has made a commitment to follow universally accepted standards and produce Web-friendly sites. We will make every attempt to write standardized Web content.
There is an non-profit organization called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C is a group of more than 350 members from various organizations around the world who have developed the standards for the Web.
The W3C is an independent organization without any ties to any of the corporations that create Web software. Although companies like Microsoft and Netscape have attempted to create their own standards, there is no guarantee that code created for one browser will work in another. To be fully compliant, Web sites should adhere to the W3C standards.
There are a number of tools that are available to validate code. W3C has an online tool available at http://validator.w3.org/, and the Web Design Group has a validator available at http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/. These tools are built to examine the HTML (or XHTML) code for validity.
At ForeSite, we validate CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and check content for Section 508, which are government standards for keeping Web content accessible to people with disabilities. W3C has a CSS validator available at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ and a Section 508 validator is available at http://www.contentquality.com/.
At ForeSite, we attempt to validate all of the code we write, however on dynamic pages content may come from a source that is beyond ForeSite's control. (For instance a client may have some control over the code, or the code may come from another Web site.) In these cases the pages may not validate.