W3C Compliance

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where standards are developed for the World Wide Web. These standards and protocols have been established to ensure long-term growth for the web and to maintain a certain level of conformity throughout the web design and development community.

There is a clear divide within the web development industry in relation to the standards that W3C imposes and the limitations that it presents on the designers, developers and users. A great deal of people have chosen to disregard the standards altogether. In most cases the best that can be done is to always take W3C compliance into account in both the design and development process to either fully eliminate or at least minimise the errors of a web site. Style sheets can sometimes be adjusted to compensate for some browser default presentation of images. However by trying to work towards minimising errors and W3C validation, you may need to sacrifice certain functions or design aspects or even to risk having some people unable to properly view your web site.

Benefits

If your web site is W3C compliant, the “W3C Compliant” badge may be displayed on any page that validates. Displaying the W3C compliant badge also shows your customers that careful consideration has been applied to W3C standards when developing your web site. Some people may view this as an indication of how you do business.

Limitations

Having W3C compliance takes away backwards compatibility with some browsers such as, Netscape 4.X and Mozilla Firefox. Depending on browser settings some of your customers may have difficulty viewing certain functions of your site. Often you will find that W3C compliant web sites pose limitations towards certain browsers. This includes issues with flash banners. Although this can be overcome by manipulating code programming, you need to be aware of the limitations surrounding this.

If you insist on W3C compliance then the creation of a web site should be done using current data relating to the usage of browsers to ensure that your web site is compatible with the most popular and used browser.