Technical Facts / Web Standards
Simply put, standards compliance is about making a Website accessible to the largest range of people possible. For the majority of Website owners, this is simply good business sense. After all, the more people you have using your site the better. In order to construct an accessible Website, it must conform to Web standards.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), other standards bodies, and the manufacturers of current versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, and open-source browsers have set new standardised technologies like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and XHTML that allow Web designers and companies the ability to create sites that conform to international standards, and are in turn fully accessible.
Many Governments around the world, including the Australian Government has legislated that websites must be standards compliant in order to be accessed by all web users.
Standards compliance will increasingly become an important issue over the next few years, and very soon all websites will be built standards compliant. It will become the next big thing in Internet development.
You can read more about web standards at http://webstandardsgroup.org/standards/
The extract above has been taken from the Electronic Productivity Solutions website. The full page can be viewed at the web standards section of the EPS site.