W3C's mission is: To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.
–W3C Website
World Wide Web Consortium
So what's all this mess about validation? What does it mean? Why should I care? Three questions that any professional web designer (and their clients) should ask him/herself daily.
The web has been around for years, and considering it's age, you could make a reasonable assumption that there would be a standard for web page design that would work on every browser imaginable. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
There is indeed a standard in place, published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Unfortunately, in the fast-growing-every-company-for-themselves early days of the net, there were little or no standards, and Netscape and Microsoft decided to go their own separate ways. This made it hard for a web developer to create a page that would look good on every browser without resorting to costly (time is money) workarounds to make everything look the same.
Fortunately, with the pressure of organizations likes the Web Standards Project and the W3C, browsers are starting to catch up to the standards recommendations, and implementing the standards we designers have longed for all these years. That means that, as a professional design firm, Site Drive can now spend more time concentrating on the layout and content of a client's page, rather than trying to figure out why a page won't work in a certain browser.
Coding to the standard also means that a site can be completely overhauled in a matter of hours instead of days. If you decided you wanted the background on every page green instead of red, changing one file would do the trick, instead of editing every page in your site. This is what makes standards so exciting.
This site itself is an example of the power of standards. Even though we have some nice borders and lots of colors on the page, we're only using three main images on this page. One for our logo one for the fancy graphic on the far right hand side and one for the bottom left. Everything else is done by using standard HTML and Cascading Style Sheets, which means that our pages load faster than a competitor that may have a site stuffed full of images to achieve simply navigational effects. We'd rather let the browser do the work.
So if you're looking for a fast site that will work in every browser, you've come to the right place. Site Drive fully supports the standardization of the web, and we'll do everything we can to ensure your site follows the standards, without punishing your viewers.