Internet is constantly evolving and having a website that is accessible to all can be nerve-racking.
Standards are being set at an international level by the Consortium World Wide Web W3C created in 1994. Its mission is to "lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web"1.
Recently-developed browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, … aim to respect these standards.
Internet Explorer (IE) occupies a strong position for several reasons. Among them, this tool was rapidly developed and proposed to users at the purchase of a personal computer allowing thus IE a market share of more than 95%. This share has been reducing regularly since the apparition of other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Netscape among others. Comparisions have often been made including that of ExtremeTech.com1.
in the future - neared than expected, Internet sites designed for IE will not be accessible thanks to the developments brought to browsers and to the generalization of standards.
Another factor is the apparition of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) at the end of 2006. IE7 respects, in a certain way, standards. A comparison was made between IE7 and Mozilla by a French site, Infos-du-Net.com3. In the future a site optimized for IE will not visible by browsers respecting the standards. Even with IE7, it will become problematic for older IE versions.
It is essential to design today the internet sites that respect the W3 recommandations and ensure their accessibility and visibilty in the future. To do this, validating the page with W3 tools is important as explained by Vulgarisation-informatique.com2.
zejam agrees with this approach and aims to offer standardized websites.
Sources