Are you thinking of creating a Web site? Are you delegating the creation of your Web site to another entity? Then setting the right requirements will help create a better final product, one that will be viewable with any browser on any device including handheld pc's, PDA's, Smart Phones and various assistive products and technologies for the blind and those with other visual, aural and physical disabilities or impairments.

Open Standards

Relying on open standards will help you in this task. Adding standards compliance to your requirements helps achieve a more powerful, accessible, and maintainable final product, and leverages the energies put into standards.

Developed by experts with input from the whole Web community, standards provide the foundation to build increasingly powerful applications.

Using Open Standards

By using open standards, your Web site's foundation is built upon technologies that have been developed and tested by leading experts in the Web community. With almost 500 companies and organizations from the IT world contributing R&D efforts to the production of W3C standards, these standards are truly the leading edge of the Web.

Standards organizations, like the W3C, build a consensus among these groups and experts to maintain and develop consistent design principles. Groups such as the Technical Architecture Group at W3C make sure that technologies can be combined nicely.

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

Design Benefits of Open Standards

Web site's designed and developed on open standards provide the following benefits:

• your Web site won't depend on the original developer
• you won't be stuck with programming you don't have access to;
• you can influence how your Web site is developed
• you can benefit from the best backward and forward compatibility.

Remember, re-using existing non-compliant code produced by a former developer can be a major undertaking and it will cost a lot to revise and/or maintain.

Because standards are built to be combined, developing new applications from an existing base is much easier. The tools to manipulate open technologies are getting more sophisticated, more numerous, and more powerful all the time.

Source: www.w3.org - Buy standards compliant Web sites