Driven By Standards is a series of articles and guides entirely centered around the subject of building sites with Web standards in mind. Doing this with Freeway isn’t entirely simple. It means that we are forced to think outside Freeway’s normal DTP-style and that some hand coding is required. And even then, it isn’t possible to create fully compliant and accessible sites just by using Freeway. So, why do it? What are the rewards – or perhaps more to the point, what are the reasons for using Freeway at all? Well, even though we don’t get all the way, we do get pretty far with Freeway; there are’t a lot of details that need to be done in other apps. And by using the layout powers of Freeway, the tedious work of site planning, construction and management is made quite a bit easier than if we were to use the industry standard apps (your BBEdits, your Adobe Photoshops, your Macromedia Dreamweavers).

Driven By Standards is an attempt to clarify why it is becoming increasingly important to incorporate Web standards and accessibility guidelines in everyday site building, what the standards are all about, how —specifically— we go about building with standards in Freeway and the steps we need to go through in other applications in order to create fully compliant, highly accessible sites.

Let me just say that there are no absolutes about all this. If you think that standards and accessibility compliancy isn’t worth getting into, then don’t do it. My hope is that more ‘ordinary’ web developers and designers will come to understand why these issues are important. Not just for the future, but right now. And I hope you enjoy the articles.