What Is W3C Compliance?
W3C stands for The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) It's an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public working together to develop standards for the Web since 1994. The purpose of W3C's is to provide the basics and the guidelines on which websites and web pages should be structured, created and to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

Why W3C Compliance is important?
Accepting the W3C standards helps you to achieve a more powerful, maintainable final product, accessible to all types of users

The W3C HTML are carefully designed to ensure that pages are viewable across the widest range of user agents, versions and platforms and to maximize accessibility. Following these W3C recommendations means that your web site is much more likely to work, both now and in the future at cross browser and at any platform

 

Everything goes very fast on the Web, and maintaining a Web site can imply fairly big operational costs. Without a compliant Web site, migrating to new platforms and adding functionalities to your applications can be expensive operations.

Have you ever had difficulties re-using existing code produced by a former provider? Even if you haven't, you can be sure that anything developed for a unique product ("browser X is the most popular, why bother with the others?") or using non-standard technologies won't scale with time and your needs, which means that it will cost a lot to maintain.

Your data are probably one of your company's biggest assets. Don't put them in proprietary formats you cannot control and which limit potential solution providers. You never know what the future holds, so invest in technologies that already belong to the future.

Accessibility means, making your site accessible to every type of user, even for the disabled persons, like a blind men who is using some speech driven screen reader, so your html should be such that it ensure easy reading by the screen reader or some other software, independent of platform.

Making a Web site accessible is both beneficial and challenging:

 

Standards-compliant code is structured in such a way that it is easier and faster for a browser to display.

W3C compliant websites have more scope to adapt the future development in technology while accommodating past technologies

Higher ranking in web searches - the structural information in compliant documents enables easy crawling of different search engines crawlers, so much easy indexing by search engines.

A standards-compliant site is easier to understand and pages are easier to edit/error-check/maintain

Now almost every new browser will be standards-compliant, so if your web site is too it is more likely to work - both now and in the future, no matter which platform you are on.

Understanding the importance of W3C compliance in your Web site coding is a straightforward concept. It's as easy as recognizing not all of your customers are using the same technology you are, and that building your Web site to be accessible by the greatest number of users is critical. While it was – and mostly still is – fairly safe to assume many users are surfing the Web with Internet Explorer or Netscape as their browser, we are confident that soon enough, that will not be the case. A fast-growing population of surfers is opting to employ open-source browsers like Mozilla and Firefox instead of a “name-brand source.”

When written with W3C compliance standards in-mind, whatever browser your customer uses to see your Web site becomes irrelevant. All of your information will appear on their screen – and the rest is up to you.