“Double U what?” was the most common answer I got when I posed this question to some friends who are also casual bloggers. I then realized that not everyone pays attention to W3C anymore – especially those who are relatively new to the Internet game. I was once again reminded of W3C when I read Ann Smarty’s post on the topic.

So what is W3C exactly? She explains it as:

The World Wide Web Consortium working to develop open standards for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3) so that Web documents can be consistently displayed across all platforms.

Founded in 1994 the consortium is still the main web standard against which all websites are evaluated. The most well known W3C tool is Markup Validation Service that checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. Other valuable tools include RSS/Atom feed validator or CSS validator, Mobile content checker, and broken link checker.

So if it is a standard, does it mean that it is most updated? Unfortunately, technology seems to be developing too fast for W3C and this may not be the case. Ann Smarty further writes:

• many of the standards are too old and are based on the last century realia (e.g. according to W3C any page limit is twenty kilobytes which is not necessary to conform to with today’s high-speed Internet connections);
• the market is moving many times faster than the W3C committee (e.g. mobile Internet which evolves too fast for both W3C and Google to compile).

So should you check your web site if it is W3C compliant? I suggest that since it is still considered the main standard, you might as well. However, do not be content with merely being W3C compliant. Do take a look at other trends and see how your web site can be improved.

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I have not used Internet Explorer for quite a while now. Ever since I tried Mozilla Firefox, I was hooked. I did try out Safari and Google Chrome – and still use them sometimes – but never IE. I can’t overlook the fact that there are still countless people out there who use IE, though, and when working on web sites or blogs, those users cannot be discounted.

There is some news with regard to SEO and the new version of the Internet Explorer, IE8. Andrew Girdwood has this to say about the matter:

Popular search engine optimisation and internet marketing blogs look set to prove that they practise what they preach by boasting designs that hold up well in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8.

It is the new ‘Suggested Sites’ feature that is most likely to upset these stalwart bloggers as Microsoft’s technology offers to take readers straight to competing blogs or, in some cases, unfamiliar download sites.

In his article, he highlights some of the most prolific blogs on SEO and search and points out things about their design that may be affected by IE8. You might want to take a closer look at those points in his article, especially if you have picked up a design idea or two from any of those blogs he talks about.

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