A new look
The NCN site has undergone a redesign! With greater focus on web standards, accessibility, and usability, we feel the new NCN site will be able to greater serve your needs.What are web standards?
Because we couldn't put it any better, here's what the Web Standards Project had to say:
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call 'web standards', are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.
What are the advantages of using web standards?
Complying with web standards can give web pages greater visibility in web searches. The structural information present in compliant documents makes it easy for search engines to access and evaluate the information in those documents, and they get indexed more accurately.
Because use of web standards makes it easier for server-side as well as client-side software to understand the structure of a document, adding a search engine to a site becomes easier and gives better results.
Standards are written so that old browsers will still understand the basic structure of your documents. Even if they can't understand the newest and coolest additions to the standards, they'll be able to display the content of your site. The same, of course, applies to robots - systems that collect information from your site on behalf of search engines and other indexers.
Compliant code gives you the opportunity of validating your page with a validation service. Validators process your documents and present you with a list of errors. This makes finding and correcting errors a lot easier, and can save you a lot of time.
Compliant documents can easily be converted to other formats, such as databases or Word documents. This allows for more versatile use of the information within documents on the World Wide Web, and simplified migration to new systems - hardware as well as software - including devices such as TVs and PDAs.
Another advantage of using web standards is increased accessibility. This mean allowing the web to be used by people with disabilities, but also allowing web pages to be understood by people using browsers such as audio browsers that read web pages aloud, Braille browsers, hand-held browsers, etc.
So, keep an eye on this site as we continue to improve our code, content, and strive to push the leading edge of web development even further!