WC3 is an international consortium that was set up by Tim Berners-Lee to develop web standards. The idea being that web technologies – hardware and software - should be compatible with one another so that the internet can function at it’s best. Included in this mission is accessability for all, whatever hardware, software, network infrastrucure, language, culture, location and physical or mental abilty – everyone should be able to enjoy the communicaton, commercial and intellectual collaboration benefits the web has to offer.
Now there’s a tall order!

What does all this mean for the humble web designer? For a start, it has complicated our lives somewhat. Gone are the days when you could test a site on whatever platform you and your colleagues/friends use and that’s grand…  no, now it needs to validate to W3C standards. Thankfully the good people at W3C have provided us with a tool to help us on our way: http://validator.w3.org/ It will analyse your code and tell you where any problems may occur so that you can spend hours fixing them. The danger is that you end up tipping and touching at the code obsessively until you get that green message: ”This document was successfully checked as XHTML whatever!” a nice feeling - but did you completely forget to check the actual website to see what fabulous bit of dynamic script was being compromised in an attempt to achieve full validation?

The good news is there are  ways of solving the common issues. Examples of some of these follow:

• Embedding Flash – don’t use the <embed> tag for flash W3C recommend using this method by Drew McLellan instead: http://alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay
• Use <script type=”text/javascript” src=”yourscript.js”></script> to call any problem javascripts rather than putting the full js code into the head of the page.
• If you get a whole pile of errors – don’t lose heart – sometimes a small oversight like an unclosed tag will confuse the code following it and by fixing one problem it may automatically sort lots of others.