The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets a standard or produces guide lines that give web designers and developers the most present set of rules to work from in order to create semantically correct web sites. The importance of correct semantics lies in everything from SEO optimisation to fast and efficient web sites that look good and function correctly.
W3C was created to ensure compatibility and agreement amoung industry members in the adoption of new standards. Prior to its creation, incompatible versions of HTML were offered by different vendors, increasing the potential for inconsistency between web pages. The consortium was created to get all those vendors to agree on a set of core principles and components which would be supported by everyone.
The Consortium is jointly administered by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL, located in Stata Center) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) (in Sophia Antipolis, France), and Keio University (in Japan). The W3C also has World Offices in sixteen regions around the world. The W3C Offices work with their regional Web communities to promote W3C technologies in local languages, broaden W3C's geographical base, and encourage international participation in W3C Activities.
Validation
A particular service that W3C provide is validation for code, it is good practice to cross check code with this validation service to ensure it complies to the requierments of the webs standards. Code can and does get out dated or be wrong.
The html code is the most the most relevent code to check, CSS/3 is involved in the styling of a web site and due to the present transtion between CSS2 and 3 creates validation is complex. To cross check the code copy and paste into the respective validator hit the validate button and wait for the results. Bad results will indicate the page or site will not be liked by SEO bots and /or will not load or look as good as it should.
