How important is CSS W3C Compliance?

Just like HTML W3C compliance, having your CSS documents validate is just as important for web development. Once again, the World Wide Web Consortium has made the process extremely simple for web developers, the W3C website allows you to validate your CSS documents by inputting the URL of your website, if it's already live, or you can either upload the CSS document directly or copy and paste the contents of your document in. All of this can be accomplished from this link http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/.

You might ask, what's the point of validating CSS documents, after all they are extremely simple and straightforward? Well, there are many reasons why a web developer would validate their CSS documents, which although many of the reasons for doing so are the same as HTML compliance, that does not make them any less valid when it comes to web development. This includes, making sure that the web page displays correctly on all current browsers, W3C compliance also means that if any future browsers support older forms of HTML and CSS (They should!) then your web page will continue to display correctly in the future. Obviously this would save lots of money when it comes to web development and would save developers a lot of time.

Using the W3C CSS validator is also an excellent method of finding small errors within the code, which is extremely helpful for web developers when your CSS document is several hundred lines of code long. Not only is this helpful for professional web design, but amateurs can benefit from the use of CSS validators as well, and can be a valuable tool in teaching good practice to new developers. Overall compliance with W3C standards indicates a level of professionalism from a web developer.