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The CWCW is encouraging all campuses to migrate toward full Web Standards compliance.

Web Standards are the technical recommendations by the W3C, the people who invented the World Wide Web. The W3C created these standards so the web would work better for everyone.

Web Standards mean utilizing the W3C Recommendations on the following technologies:

• Extensible Hypertext Markup Language - XHTML 1.0 and higher
• Extensible Markup Language - XML 1.0 and higher
• Cascading Style Sheets - CSS Level 1, 2 and higher
• Document Object Model - DOM Level 1, 2 and higher
• ECMAScript 262 (the standard version of JavaScript)

A "standards compliant" pages means that the site is made using CSS to do layout instead of tables. This method has several advantages:

• It separates the content from the format, which makes future format changes easier and allows non-technical people to edit the content.
• It meets the requirements of the ADA Section 508 and W3C's WAI for accessibility across platforms, browsers and devices.
• It reduces bandwidth demands considerably, as styles and formats are cached after the first page is viewed, and one style file works for many pages.
• It makes a content management system a real possibility, since a CMS requires that content (data) be separate from formatting and layout specifications.

By using web standards when designing you can improve your web page ranking in search engines, your web pages are more accessible, content on pages will display in older browsers, allows for design changes to be made easier, pages are smaller in file size so they will download faster, and many other reasons.

Visit the Reference Links for resources on learning to design with web standards.