W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium who are the recognized standards organization for the world wide web. This organization was founded by Tim Berners-Lee and is run by a full-time staff to continue to develop and maintain web standards. These standards are then used to help guide web developers and browsers to develop code that lives up to certain standards. In a nutshell, they write the rule-book that helps to define if our code is well-written or poorly written. This is how we know if our markup (code) is awesome or not-so-awesome.

Why its important for your websites ?

It’s important that your site is W3C valid to ensure the site works properly on your browser as well as the other major browsers such as Internet Explorer, FireFox, Chrome, etc. A website that contains many errors can suffer from many ill-effects.

The following are just some of those ill-effects:-

• Not displaying properly or consistently
• Not compatible with all major browsers
• Not displaying properly on devices of varying sizes like mobile devices
• Ranks badly in search engines (because they can’t read the code)
• Loads elements slowly

Websites that are coded to standards last longer and are “future-proofed” for the most part against browser updates and the like. If your code is bad, the chances of your website breaking as browsers update is greater than if the code validated.