What is standards compliance?
Standards Compliance refers to a set of best practice principles that can govern any given industry including web development. There are a few organizations that regulate these principles, most notably the World Wide Web Consortium. Web Browsers and other web interfaces are often developed to comply with the standards the W3C puts forth. If a website is not validated as complying with these principles, then there might be errors in the final output.
How important is it?
Being standard compliant is not the end all be all of web development. I have websites that are validated and a few that are not. In many cases, a site validates 100%, but other dynamic elements might bring that down a few points. If your site validates as Standard Compliant, some directories might list you just for that reason. In fact it can improve your sites overall ranking on many search engines. This also improves how many devices can actually interpret your site accurately, which is directly linked to the amount of users that will find you.
Shortcuts and Tips
Achieving full or almost full compliance is not that difficult. Many software and applications used for web development can help find errors in a site. For example; Dreamweaver has an option that allows this. The web development extension for Firefox can help you here also. And the number one place to go is validator.w3.org.
W3.org also offers a corrected, fully compliant version of any unvalidated pages.
Conclusion
Standard compliance is very useful as a search engine optimization method, and insuring proper compatibility with various devices. Although some might overlook this for various reasons, the benefits are clear. It’s a good idea to check your code for errors at various intervals of production, avoiding simple mistakes. But generally, validation is done as part of the final edit and review process.
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