W3C And Its Relevance To Advanced Web Design Technology

[symonds]

What is W3C?
W3C or World Wide Web Consortium is an organization established with the objective to develop a set of pre-defined practice standard for the internet. According to W3C, the internet can reach its full potential if the fundamental web technologies are compatible with any hardware or software used to access the internet.

W3C consists of member organizations and other companies who are engaged to develop a standard web technology. Till now, W3C has already written more than 90 standards which are known as W3C recommendations. These are the web designing philosophy which has been defined as a strictly-defined set of practices for developing websites. Besides, W3C has product standards which manage the most fundamental elements of web design including recommendations for mark-up languages (HTML, XHTML, SVG and Xforms), Style sheets (CSS), Java Scripts, and for other document specific model.

Benefits of Conforming To W3C Standards

Search Engine Visibility
Both your developers and users stand to gain from conforming to W3C standards. The most important benefit is that enhanced website accessibility. For instance, a compliant will be more visible to the search engines which, in turn, will increase the traffic to your site.

Browser Compatibility
The compliant websites enhance accessibility for the end-users as well. For instance, clients using non-traditional browsers including voice browsers, Braille browsers or hand-held browsers with very little monitor space, will not face any problem while using software developed on W3C coding standards.

Time-saving
If the web pages are written following to the W3C coding standards, it will save a great deal of time for the developers and the process of debugging and trouble-shooting as the coding is written conforming to the W3C standards.

Convertibility
W3C compliant documents can be easily converted to other formats including database and word document. Moreover, the migration of W3C compliant documents to new systems such as televisions and PDAs is a lot easier.

Stability
W3C codes ensure both forward and backward compatibility which helps the data written in old standard to work in newer browsers. Moreover, the data written to newer versions will produce an acceptable result in older browsers as well. On the top of it, if you code is W3C compliant then you can create many versions of one code to ensure that it can be viewed by everyone.

Universality
W3C standard coding ensures universality. Indeed, it would be unrealistic to expect that the same developers and designers will be involved in the designing and development and maintenance of a website. W3C standards offer a set of rules that are easy to learn, follow and implement by all developers. W3C standards-compliant coding ensures that each developer easily understand the existing coding conventions and the new designers also pick up where their predecessors left off.

The acceptance of W3C compliant coding ensures that the web will get more streamlined and universalized. Further, conformity to the W3C will solve the existing problems that are being found in the existing system. The adoption of pre-defined standards will increase the functionality as well.

[kgun]

Exellent post by a newcomer.

[DaveSawers]

Originally Posted by symonds

Search Engine Visibility
... For instance, a compliant will be more visible to the search engines which, in turn, will increase the traffic to your site.

There are many good reasons for writing standard code and I would always support a push towards the writing of better code. But... There's no evidence that this is one of the advantages.

[Webnauts]

No matter if W3C compliance affects or not search engine visibility, I recommend to avoid promoting the idea that valid HTML is a useless practice. Otherwise the web industry will never ever recover from the incompetence it already has to deal with.

In addition I wanted to mention here that I upgraded my web site doctype to XHTML+RDFa, and diverse browsers have problems with just one single markup error. I am wondering how bots would deal with that. Any thoughts?

[MrGamm]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

No matter if W3C compliance affects or not search engine visibility, I recommend to avoid promoting the idea that valid HTML is a useless practice.

I am wondering how bots would deal with that. Any thoughts?

I agree... garbage in... garbage out... garbage down the line... A bot which cannot read a document most certainly can be blamed for not trying harder. However... can you blame 3,000 different bots for not trying harder?

What happens when more bots come online? Are we all expected to serve them XML? I don't think this will ever be the standard... especially with the current HTML 5 vs XHTML 2.0 split...

Good code is fairly mandatory... It does matter... not alot... but every little bit counts. jmo...

In any event... I will readily adopt what the WC3 says so long as everyone else is on the bandwagon. I will not be tricked into allowing them to lead the pack... just as I was never tricked in allowing microsoft to lead the pack... although... come on... who has never made use of innerHTML?

For that matter... Who has never made use of a WYSIWYG editor? I do believe they were the first to introduce the capability in internet explorer 5.

[dmwcons]

A demonstration that your work is to some sort of generally accepted standard may be an advantage to you in the event of a dispute over the quality of that work.

[pageoneresults]

Good day everyone. This is a reply that I posted at Search Engine Journal. Apparently they've banned me from posting over there. That seems to be a trend these days when I'm able to counter something that someone swears by.

Many of the standards are too old and are based on the last century realia (e.g. according to W3C any page limit is twenty kilobytes which is not necessary to conform to with today’s high-speed Internet connections);

Standards are too old? The standards have been evolving since they were first established. There is nothing old about them. In fact, the WCAG just released the 2.0 Recommendation on 2008-12-18 and you say the standards are too old? Where did that come from?

The market is moving many times faster than the W3C committee (e.g. mobile Internet which evolves too fast for both W3C and Google to compile)

It doesn't matter how fast the market is moving, there are standards in place for that market to follow initially. If they go outside those standards, they do so with a certain amount of risk.

Some of W3C tools are often broken or too slow which is unacceptable when speaking about the committee aiming at standardized www

That is untrue. I've not run into any of their tools that are broken. If they are too slow, maybe its your site that is the problem and the tool is doing its best to compensate for your non standard code?

Standards have a tendency to “stifle creativity“, never allowing web developers to push the boundaries of what is acceptable in order to see what might be accomplished outside the rules.

That is the most bogus excuse for anyone to use. The only thing that stifles creativity is the person themselves. I've seen plenty of highly creative sites that validate. And, I've seen many that could easily validate if they took the time to understand what was happening under the hood.

So my main question is: is checking a website against W3C validity part of your on-site diagnostics?

It is the very first thing that should be done.

Do you still care?

Absolutely!

Do you pay attention to all errors or only to to major ones (skipping what you deem unimportant)?

All errors are important.

In my opinion, W3C validation and SEO aren’t very closely related.

They operate hand in hand once you fully understand what is happening here.

But when it comes to SEO it’s not a pending factor.

Who says? Got any proof to support that statement?

I don’t use the w3c validator but I do find that using some of the old html based standards makes things easier for bots to crawl.

Which old based standards are you referring to? There are no old based standards so I'm a little confused as to what everyone is referring to when saying "old standards".

SEOs should understand them but not place a lot of focus.

Cool! All of you SEOs reading this should take that advice seriously. Do not put any focus on standards, none whatsoever. Watch how quickly you become a dinosaur in this industry.

W3C compliance in no way affects search engine visibility — not where the major search engines are concerned.

I wouldn't be too certain about that.

This is an easy topic to get burned on, and probably most people in the SEO community who have discussed it HAVE been burned for it.

Yes it is and I smell something burning right now!

There is no direct correlation with or benefit for SEO in adhering to W3C compliance

Ah, it would take me quite a bit of time to convince you otherwise. That is okay, I don't want to at this point. I have some topics going at WebmasterWorld that may change your mind about that.

But we’re going to be working with non-HTML documents and non-W3C compliant HTML documents for years to come.

Ya, that is why they have Transitional DOCTYPEs.

No matter if W3C compliance affects or not search engine visibility, I recommend to avoid promoting the idea that valid HTML is a useless practice.

Kudos to you sir. That is a major problem with today's authors in this industry, they get into things they shouldn't, end up saying things that are not true and cause grief for everyone later on. In this case though, I'd rather all of you listen to what is being said here and pay no attention to the standards, you are better off anyway.

If a site validates to the strictest of W3C validation, it is semantically correct.

That would be incorrect. Many sites that validate fail the "semantically correct" test.

How important are standards and the criteria that make up those standards? You decide for yourself.

The Ultimate SEO Guide - On Page SEO Techniques

HTML 4 SEO Best Practices for HTML Authoring

Semantic Data Extractor - Semantically Rich HTML

And when you are done with everything, you can do some initial quality testing here...

URI Valet - Test Landing Page Load Times and Check Server Headers

[Webnauts]

PageOneResults,

I gave you a rep point for the great post, but more for this The Ultimate SEO Guide for 2009

You are supporting my preachings of years, i.e SEO Workers would appreciate review - SEO Workers Forums (post: 04-03-2007).

Look at SEJ. I have a great debate there: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/w...t-to-seo/8087/

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Off-topic: How good are my chances to get my site listed on your directory?