W3C Compliance

W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium. Since 1994, the W3C has provided the guidelines by which web sites and web pages should be structured and created.

It has a nice layout, works in most browsers, so why nit-pick?

I, like many others, had chosen to ignore the W3C guidelines.... until recently. Here was my reasoning:

"Let's face it... you can't please everybody! I have several browsers installed on my PC and check the websites I create in these browsers. If it looks good in these, I know it is satisfying the needs of 98% of the viewers."

The "errors" I got when checking the validity of my sites seemed so petty. "This" was not allowed, "That" is not the way you do this, blah blah blah. It's the way I learned and it works so leave me alone. Call me stubborn. Call me an old dog. I didn't want to have to re-learn this stuff all over again.

Getting it right on the inside as well as the outside.

Well... I buckled down. I stayed up late, tested, tried, and re-tried. Guess what... It's really not as hard as I thought it would be.

This website is a shining example. My first 100% valid XHTML Transitional 1.0 web site. HTML 4.01 is the current standard for HTML... XMTML 1.0 is a step up, basically taking advantage of up and coming XHTML features but allows small adjustments for the benefit of those with older browsers, hence the "transitional" designation.

For a kicker, I recoded this website without tables. The layout is 100% CSS defined. (CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet). This is not a compliance issue, but it is the trend for the future.

What does all this mean for you?

If you are here looking for a web designer all that technical babble above probably meant nothing to you. As a web developer it means everything to me, and it will mean everything to you, as a customer of DF Web Services in posession of not only a nice looking web site, but one that is completely valid and clean on the inside as well.

My attention to detail will reflect on you and your web site, which will equal a better first impression to your visitors, and maybe even better search engine ranking in the future.

Browser note

Regardless of the steps you take for cross-browser functionality, not every browser will present every web site the way it was supposed to be viewed. The most common browsers, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox, and Apple's Safari are generally up to speed though. Personally, I recommend Firefox.

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