Through out the last few years, I have worked on a number of projects that have involved improving web accessibility, search engine optimization and user experience design. Time and time again the first and foremost suggestion that I offer is an adoption of web standards. I cannot understand why developers don’t have valid code hard wired in to their brains.

I am working on a rather large accessibility initiative and am continually telling people to “drop the tables and use a css based layout”. 90% of the discussions shouldn’t be about accessibility but should include seo, code maintainability, optimized work flows and user experience design. The fact of the matter is, if implemented correctly, web standards development brings such a large array of advantages to any web site that there is NO reason to develop without them.

It is very important to mention that a lot of developers say that they develop “standards based” web sites but really don’t. I truly believe that most people think that they are complying with web standards because they have validated their code but in reality, require a lot of corrections with issues such as poor alt attributes, incorrect mark-up structure, redundant id and class attributes and so much more.

There are a ton of resources on the subject and I honestly am suprised to see myself posting a web standards entry in 2009. It is a reality that people are continuing to develop table based layouts and I feel obligated to offer the best resource that I have come across. Designing with web standards was written by Jeffrey Zeldman and is an absolute gem that must be read by all developers.