When the Internet first began gaining popularity, W3-Compliance wasn’t as necessary because there were fewer browsers, fewer users, and overall fewer technologies in use. With the growing popularity of the internet, new developmental tools are created daily. With these tools come new challenges – marketing, design, cross-browser compatibilty, etc. All of these can be a daunting task for those who aren’t well-versed in the W3C Standards.

There are numerous technologies used by programmers like ASP, PHP, and Javascript to name a few. W3 has a set of standards for both XHTML and CSS, and making a website W3-compliant ensures that all viewers will see the site exactly the same way no matter what browser they’re using. Validation also helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because clean code means easier search-engine spidering.

Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is a technology often used in sites with many pages to make aesthetic changes easier. The style sheet is an exterior file that runs interdependently with the HTML of a site. The style sheet serves as a template for the entire site’s color and font schemes, while also controlling borders, sizes, and more. Being able to edit a single file, instead of 100s of changes in many files saves a lot of time. Validation is essential to get the most out of a website. A user can upload or copy/paste their CSS file to the W3C site, and they’ll be given a list of any errors it contains.

Another of the technologies becoming more popular is Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML. XHTML is an extension of HTML 4.0. XHTML conforms to standards moreso than HTML. As such, it is more search-engine and user-friendly:

- XHTML documents conform to XML. XML Tools can double as XHTML tools.
- XHTML is an extension of HTML 4.0. It is more user-friendly and streamlined than HTML.
- XHTML is a combination of HTML and XML in that it can run scripts and applets that use both the HTML and XML DOM (Document Object Model)
- As XHTML grows, XHTML 1.0 documents will be able to interoperate among other XHTML documents making it a more browser transitional language.
(Source: www.w3.org)

Using the standards of web development lined out by the W3C is imperative for users to get the most out of a site. Often, making a webpage W3-compliant is the first step of SEO, a marketing tool to get the most out of your advertising money. Validation is easy, and can be completed if a user has a basic knowledge of HTML-editing and FTP. Using these tools, coupled with the set of W3 standards can save a lot of money and help the site’s overall functionality.