The World Wide Web Consortium W3C was established in 1994 to lead the Web to its full potential by developing standards and protocols that promote its evolution while assuring interoperability.

Validating web page compliance with these standards and protocols insures that all users–regardless of their culture, language, education, ability, material resources, access devices or physical limitations–have equal access to the resources of your website.

Some well known members are:

• BM
• Microsoft
• America Online
• Apple
• Adobe
• Macromedia
• Sun Microsystems

To see if your website is conform to the W3C you can use free online tools

• HTML. Are your web pages W3C standards compliant? Submit your web pages for HTML validation here:

http://validator.w3.org/

• CSS. If your website employs CSS (cascading style sheets), and it probably should, submit your style sheets for validation here:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

• Links. Link validation is not an element of standards compliance, but it is certainly an element of quality assurance. Test here:

http://validator.w3.org/checklink/

If the W3C validators (see links above) find errors in your HTML or CSS, then it may be time to consider redesigning your website. If you find errors there, then it may be time to consider hiring a new web designer.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.