Why are W3C standards required? Well, the answer is simple and yet contains a few technical details. Let us try to go into the details and understand why do websites have to comply to the W3C standards.
With the launch of the Internet, there was not much problem in designing websites. For instance, in 1996, though the word wide web had come a long way, more than what Tim Berner Lee could have imagined, but the websites were nothing but a list of text documents designed in HTML and occasionally with a picture, to spice things up. (Forget graphics and flash, it was more than that could be done in those days!!!) The process was simple. But yet people who could foresee and understand, immediately got hold of the fact, that the Internet is a very powerful technology. It will bring in a lot of developments and innovations and as it is the case with any technology, it will also bring in some complications. And so it did. Though initially designing websites was not an issue for web development programmers as there were few browsers and limited resources. But then the browser war broke out. The leaders in this field, all launched their own browsers, each with a new set of facilities. To worsen things up, the developers of web browsers felt that nobody should have the right to question their browsers and whether a website will be compatible to their browser or not was entirely an issue that lied in their hands.
There were even newer technologies like JavaScript, PHP, ASP, etc. and any website that was designed using these languages is supposed to be compatible with all the browsers available. Finally the W3 standards were set, to give away with all these chaos. W3 standards have a fixed set of rules for XHTML and CSS. Thus, any website that is W3 compliant will function the same for any user using any browser. This validation also helped in search engine optimization as now the search engine robots could crawl through websites even more easily because of the clean code.
With the World Wide Web constantly expanding beyond control, it is required that there are some guidelines that monitor the growth in a controlled way. The W3 standards prove to be as one of the guides that helps the websites grow to their full potential.
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