Why W3C standards work?

We have assessed a lot of web-pages across the internet only to find out that a majority of them do not comply to the W3C standards. There are many reasons why developers opt to break W3C standards but there is almost no good reason why they should. A developer, or a website owner, you might ask why W3C is so important. They would often argue that W3C standards are more of a set of guidelines than the law of the land, and in that respect, they may be correct to some degree. However, in my personal opinion, W3C should be taken as law specially when designing websites that will be viewed in varied systems. I have compiled a few reasons why developers should stick with W3C and they are pretty good ones!

Website's Browser Compatibility

A lot of browsers display things a little bit differently from other browsers. It dosen't matter if your website it W3C complaint or not, the fact is that current browsers will always have "something different" with them. Before W3C came into popularity, a lot of web designers foolishly designed websites for one particular browser, most notably, Microsoft's Internet Explorer(IE). This made browsers to look good on a particular version of IE, but often fails to render properly with browsers such as Opera and Mozilla. In the advent of MacBooks, Firefox, and Safari, more and more website surfers land on ugly, distorted pages designed specifically for one browser that is not even in their system. In worst case scenarios, pages failed to load. This is where W3C standards step in. W3C assures that differences displayed across all platforms are kept to a minimum. It ensures that your website will look just as nice in IE as it it in Firefox. Good web-designers would not design websites for specific browsers, but design it according to the W3C standards which would most likely make it look nice on as much browsers as possible.

Future Proof

If you design a website that is way off the W3C standards, it may work today but there is no guarantee that tomorrow it will look just as good. Because browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer are often updated, you may find out one morning that your site is out of whack because of an update. A reason here is because some visual features and effects that developers use are not part of the W3C standards, and may actually be bugs or experimental browser features that render pages the way they do. When the new browser versions are installed, there is no guarantee that these features will remain and these bugs might have been fixed leaving you with a horrible looking web-page. Sticking to the standards will provide you with adequate protection that your sites will be rendered the same as it did months ago no matter how much your visitors update their browsers.

Search Engine Compatibility

Mal-formed tags are often a big problem with non-standards compliance websites. Many search engines including Google give tags importance in the way they rank pages. Typically, a web-page is crawled by search engines, some tags are stripped and some tags are analyzed. If tags are formatted wrong, search engines may have a problem. For example; if Google cannot determine if a keyword is important because of a broken tag, it might treat it the same as other non-trivial words in your web-page giving it a lower score for that keyword that it should. Even worse, it may ignore some content all together. SEO people know how important tags are and working with W3C compliant sites can sometimes make a big diffrence.