Ignored for a long time by many developers, standards such as HTTP, HTML or XML are at the very core of the success of the Web. The current trend of stressing standards compliance on the Web is not due to chance: they are a win-win for all participants.

Developed by experts and with input from the whole Web community, standards work together to provide the foundation to build increasingly powerful applications. Standards are the result of a lot of energy and expertise and are available for free: don't miss the opportunity to benefit from their leveraging effect!

For a more powerful Web site

On the Web, being up-to-date with the latest technologies is a difficult exercise: choosing the wrong tool or architecture can lead to losses in money, time, or customers.

By using standards, your Web site's foundation is built upon technologies that have been developed and tested by leading experts in the Web community.

Orienting your choices toward standards means getting the latest innovations, but only those that are solid enough to gather consensus, and hence, the technologies that are here to stay:

• HTML has a non-diminishing success for its 12 years of existence, thanks to the careful developments and innovations it has integrated during that time.
• HTTP is a network protocol that finds new usages every so often: originally used to surf the Web, its recent use as a messaging protocol through SOAP is only a step toward the Web Services deployment and
• XML, only 4 years old, is used almost everywhere nowadays, and new use cases of its flexibility are regularly discovered and implemented.

More recently achieved standards such as SVG and P3P are catching on quickly, and still hold many possible new applications!

Reduced maintenance costs

Everything goes very fast on the Web, and maintaining a Web site can imply fairly big operational costs. Without a compliant Web site, migrating to new platforms and adding functionalities to your applications can be expensive operations.

However, if your applications are developed on open standards, your applications won't depend on a unique provider:

• you won't be stuck with formats you don't have access to
• you can influence how the standards are developed, and
• you can benefit from the best backward- and even forward-compatibility.

Have you ever had difficulties re-using existing code produced by a former provider? Even if you haven't, you can be sure that anything developed for a unique product ("browser X is the most popular, why bother with the others?") or using non-standard technologies won't scale with time and your needs, which means that it will cost a lot to maintain.

Because standards are built to be combined, developing new applications from an existing base is much easier: the tools to manipulate open technologies get more sophisticated, more numerous, and more powerful all the time. Moving your Web pages to XHTML, for instance, means that you can easily transform the data to other formats using XSLT or ask for a powerful publishing system with validating mechanisms using XML Schema. And for each of these operations, you can choose from a wide range of tools from many different producers.

Finally, standards usually avoid the infamous feature creep of other formats and clearly separate orthogonal applications: using CSS lets you cleanly separate the presentation from the structure of your data. This very same separation also saves in the operational costs: using CSS means less HTML code for each page, and therefore bandwidth saving.

Your data are probably one of your company's biggest assets. Don't put them in proprietary formats you cannot control and which limit potential solution providers. You never know what the future holds, so invest in technologies that already belong to the future.

Benefit from accessibility designs

Making a Web site accessible is both beneficial and challenging:

• beneficial because it broadens your potential audience and makes it much more usable for everyone — some level of accessibility is also required by law in a growing number of countries, and
• challenging because it requires thorough designing and testing to address diverse issues.

Thanks to various efforts (the Web Accessibility Initiative for instance), accessibility has been integrated into an important number of standards, either natively or by using techniques specifically designed for them. Using standards technologies lets you benefit directly from design decisions that have been tested by the Web community and are complemented by a large set of tools.

More generally, open standards are reviewed from important and difficult points-of-view. For example, W3C standards are checked not only against accessibility features, but against internationalization capacities, and device independence, which guarantees their capacity to scale quickly to new audiences.

Don't be fooled: sooner or later, your site (be it public, an extranet, or an intranet) will need to be available for more people with increasingly demanding requirements.