What is the W3C?

Created in 1994, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) provide ‘recomendations’ on the ways in which HTML, CSS, XML, XHTML and the standard Document Object Model (DOM) should be used. Over 500 member organisation belong to the consortium, its director Tim Berners-Lee (http://www.w3c.org/people/Berners-Lee/) invented the web in 1989.

What is WASP?

WASP (The Web Standards Project) was created in 1998. They labelled W3C recommendations as ‘Web Standards’ and encouraged browser manufacturers such as Microsoft, Opera, Mozzilla and Safari to conform to these Web standards and to the W3C’s Recommendations.

Do browsers comply with web standards?

Although most internet browsers comply with most of the recommendations from WASP and the W3C relating to the how web pages should interpret HTML, XHTML, CSS and XML, non comply fully with all recommendations. It is for this reason that the appearance of a web page may differ from one browser to the next even if the mark up used complies with web standards.

Should websites comply with Web Standards?

In general yes, this website provides an example of a site that complies with all of the W3C current recommendations (Web Standards). However it is not advisable to comply completely with web standards in all cases. Some browsers are not standards compliant, in order to ensure that websites provide all users with a high quality experience it may in some cases be necessary to deviate from standards compliant markup and scripting languages.