How important is W3C compliance?

Testing a web page’s W3C compliance is a key element of web development, luckily for web developers the Wold Wide Web Consortium (or W3C) has an excellent tool for testing this at http://validator.w3.org/.

They provide a variety of methods to test your web page; you can validate it by providing the URL if the web page is live already. You may also upload a HTML document directly or validate it by posting the HTML code directly into the W3C site.

The validator is also useful for identifying errors in the code, as it not only says whether the web page is W3C compliant, but gives the web developer warnings on what parts of the code are preventing the web page from being W3C compliant. This is useful in allowing a web developer find small errors such as accidental absence of closing tags for paragraphs and the like as well as large errors. All of this makes the W3C validator a significantly important tool in the complicated process of web development and is not a tool that should be forgotten by web developers, professional or otherwise.

How important is W3C compliance? It is an interesting question, and extremely important in the world of web development, after all if the website appears correctly in one popular browser then why should it matter? It all comes down to industry standards, what one browser interprets bad HTML to be, could be completely different to what another popular browser does, resulting in possible incorrect formatting and an overall reduced aesthetic appeal for other users. If the standards are followed, then a W3C compliant web browser will have no trouble displaying what a web developer wants it to. Not only this, but it has been suggested by some that W3C compliant web pages are favoured over their non-compliant competitors by Search Engines.

In the end, W3C compliance is one of the most important aspects of web development, web developers should look at and following industry standards can only help a website.