Why W3C Compliance matters..
(by SolutionSpace Team, May 2007)


W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), an international consortium which develops web standards, has outlined the guidelines and best practices to be followed while creating websites. Since these are guidelines and not rules, these need not be strictly followed to make websites work correctly on common browsers and the browsers themselves are quite a bit forgiving in accepting HTML code which does not follow the standards. However, the problem is that when faced with illegal HTML code, different browsers understand this code differently and therefore there is very little control over how the final product appears in different browsers.

Compliance with W3C standards helps ensure that the look and feel of your website remains very similar when accessed from any browser from different platforms like Mac or Unix/Linux or even when accessed from handheld devices like PDAs or cellphones.

In addition, compliance ensures accessibility for the disabled. This is especially important with accessibility being the law in many countries. There have been instances in the past wherein damages have been awarded to a blind user when he filed a lawsuit against the owners of a website he found to be inaccessible.

Does W3C Compliance help in SEO?

There is a section of people who think W3C compliance helps in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While there is no concrete proof that this is indeed true, there is growing acceptance that an optimized code which is W3C compliant stands a better chance for spiders to crawl than a code which has complete disregard for the standards.

When search engines crawl through web-pages containing errors, they make decisions on how to deal with these errors and there is a high likelihood that they may not index a certain portion of the webpage due to errors. Having a code free of errors and compliant with standards therefore stands a better chance of being indexed by search engines.

Ultimately, reducing the ratio of code to content, using keywords in your header tags, and replacing header GIFs with actual text will help your sites get better search engine results.

How do I know if my site is W3C Compliant?

W3C Compliance involves compliance with W3C CSS standards, W3C HTML/XHTML standards and finally W3C Accessibility standards. There are numerous websites that provide free validators for W3C compliance. Some of these are listed below:

• W3C Consortium provides a validation tool for W3C HTML/XHTML in their website: http://validator.w3.org
• They also provide a tool for validating stylesheets for CSS compliance: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
• FireFox web browser has a web developer extension which provides a one-click check for compliance and provides a list of where your errors are, what's causing them and links to solutions right from the W3C. The extension provides testing for HTML, XHTML, CSS and Accessibility compliance.
• Cynthia Says Portal helps check websites for compliance with US Section 508 standards and the Web Content Acessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

There are several other websites that provide tools for checking W3C Compliance and can be found by Googling.

How do I make my site W3C Compliant?

Designing W3C compliant websites involves designing CSS (Cascaded Style Sheets) for your websites which serve as the template providing the design elements for the website.

This separation of design and content is very important to developing efficient, fast-loading and consistent websites which can be redesigned at much lesser cost if needed.

This also eliminates the key disadvantages of the previous method of using tables to design websites - a) Mixing design with content made the webpages unnecessarily large and increased the loading time, b) Expensive to redesign, c) difficult to maintain consistency throughout the website.

Using CSS and simple html to layout the pages helps keep content separate from the actual design and thereby increases the speed of loading (since the presentation form gets cached in the form of CSS and only the content needs to get downloaded).

Redesigning a webpage needs only change of the CSS and no editing of the content is needed.  Check out http://www.csszengarden.com for examples of this in action.

One of the best resources I have seen on the web regarding CSS is http://www.dezwozhere.com/links.html which has lots of information on CSS, compliance, accessibility along with links for free online tools for checking compliance.

CSS does have a steep learning curve and can cause quite a bit of frustration initially for web designers, although it becomes easier as you gain experience with it.

At SolutionSpace, we have experts who can design a W3C certified website for you or redesign your existing website to make it compliant. Contact Us for your web design and compliance requirements.