You might have noticed that every time when you see an advertisement copy or a snapshot of a company’s website in some gallery there will be at least 4 things mentioned by the company. 1. Manual coding or Hand coding 2. Cross browser compatibility 3. Semantic coding 4. W3C Compliance. Why only these 4 things are focused while making a marketing or sales pitch, other than 5. Turnaround time and 6. Price.
5th and 6th points may differentiate between companies but from 1st to 4th you will find each company providing the same thing. This is because these are web standards and also market standards, for the better usability of the user. Now let’s discuss all the points from Manual coding to W3C compliance and their need.
Manual coding or Hand coding
Hand coding HTML/CSS markups is always preferred over the use of software because there are many semantic niceties which can not be performed precisely by those specialized software. Hence an automatic code does not fit in the requirement and since it is not used.
Cross-browser compatibility
There can not be any control over user behavior and hence no idea which browser will be used? Today user is not limited to any particular medium. He/she can scroll your website via any mobile device or browser to utilize. To ensure correct website appearance in different browser and make it accessible to wider audience, browser-specific code is added to a website HTML/CSS markup.
Semantic coding
HTML and CSS can make the same web page appear in different ways. Semantic coding is about showing your content in most logical format. Fro example:- Heading is shown under H1 tag (“heading1”), H2 for sub heading and so on. Normally a semantic-coded site is more search engine friendly; search engines “understand” it better and rank it accordingly.
W3C compliance
W3C is World Wide Web Consortium which takes care of all the guidelines and also develops them. All the specifications, tools and web guidelines including HTML and CSS first pass through W3C and then come into effect. A site meeting W3C standards means a quality certificate for the website. The W3C validity of a website can be checked at validator.w3.org and jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/.
Though semantic codings do not contain that much importance as they used to earlier but still from user point of view it is indeed important. According to experts next generation web will be retrieve more correct data from computers and human beings.
