W3C HTML/XHTML Standards

Does the coding of your web site conform to Internet standards?  The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the generally-accepted standards body for defining how the web should work, although it really has no enforcement power.  Given that, why then should your web coding conform to "standards" that are little more than agreed-upon suggestions?

Browsers will accept Web pages and try to display them even if they're not legal HTML/XHTML.  Usually this means that the browser will try to make educated guesses about what you probably meant.  The problem is that different browsers (or even different versions of the same browser) will make different guesses about the same illegal coding;  worse, if your HTML is really messed up, the browser could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash.  Therefore, to insure that your web site can be reliably viewed by virtually any user with any browser, your goal should be to use only valid HTML/XHTML coding.

For an example of how coding is validated, click here to validate the PCV Software home page (the validation page will open in a new browser window).