Commonly used technical terms

STANDARDS COMPLIANT

Many years ago when the web was young, there was only one web-browser and it only showed websites in text, suddenly in 1996 a guy called Tim Bernars-Lee invented something called HTML, a method for displaying rich text and images on the web, soon enough a number of seperate web-browsers where created, Microsoft gained the advantage by shipping it's browser, Internet Explorer, with copies of Windows, whereas other companies such as Mozilla created higher quality browsers capable of much more such as Netscape Navigator and eventually, Firefox.

A website which looks perfect in one browser can look terrible or not even work at all in another, Internet Explorer itself can display a website differently depending on which version if it you are using, Tim Bernars-Lee realised that a need for a web 'standard' was needed to ensure that no matter which browser the user had, all websites looked more-or-less the same and that no functionality was lost, thus he formed the World Wide Web Consortium and created a list of standards which all web-designers should conform to.

Today there are five major browsers, most web design companies still do not fully conform to the standards, when questions they give excuses like 'Internet Explorer is so popular it is unlikely that any of your customers will use anything else'. To a point, this is true, Internet Explorer is still the most popular web-browser, but it doesnt have the lead on the competition most web designers believe, a little bit of reasearch on the internet shows that Internet Explorer only has roughly 57% of the market, leaving nearly 1/2 of your potential customers at risk of not seeing your website how it was intended to be seen.

At Swarm, all our websites are fully standards compliant and are tested in all five major browsers to ensure that everyone receives your message.

For more information on this subject please visit the World Wide Web Consortium

 

ACCESSIBILITY

Simply put, accessibility is another web standard of practice to ensure that everyone who has the capacity to use a computer, even if they are impaired in some way, can use your website effectively.

You won't see this mentioned very often by a web designer yet, this is largely because it is A) Fairly new legislation that many people are not even aware of yet and B) Its really quite difficult to ensure a website meets the very strict requirements to pass.

Visual impairments are a lot more common than many people realise, in the UK alone there are approximately two million people who suffer from significant visual impairment and many more who have lesser impairments, accessibilty standards ensure that these people are not discriminated against when browsing the internet.

Even more shocking is that in 2004 the Disability and Discrimination act of 1999 came into force, making it a legal requirement for any websites belonging to a commercial entity or providing a service must conform to at least the first of three levels of accessibility requirements.

At Invasion we ensure that all of our websites conform to ALL THREE levels of accessibility, we believe the internet is for everyone to enjoy and visual impairments should not stop that enjoyment.

For more information about this subject, please visit the Web Accessibility Initiative.