My question really, what is the advantages to validating your code to W3C standard?

3 What are the advantages of using web standards?

3.1 Accessibility

3.1.1 To software/machines

Complying with web standards can give your web pages greater visibility in web searches. The structural information present in compliant documents makes it easy for search engines to access and evaluate the information in those documents, and they get indexed more accurately.

Because use of web standards makes it easier for server-side as well as client-side software to understand the structure of your document, adding a search engine to your own site becomes easier and gives better results.

Standards are written so that old browsers will still understand the basic structure of your documents. Even if they can’t understand the newest and coolest additions to the standards, they’ll be able to display the content of your site. The same, of course, applies to robots - systems that collect information from your site on behalf of search engines and other indexers.

Compliant code gives you the opportunity of validating your page with a validation service. Validators process your documents and present you with a list of errors. This makes finding and correcting errors a lot easier, and can save you a lot of time.

Compliant documents can easily be converted to other formats, such as databases or Word documents. This allows for more versatile use of the information within documents on the World Wide Web, and simplified migration to new systems - hardware as well as software - including devices such as TVs and PDAs.

3.1.2 To people

Accessibility is an important idea behind many web standards, especially HTML.

Not only does this mean allowing the web to be used by people with disabilities, but also allowing web pages to be understood by people using browsers other than the usual ones - including voice browsers that read web pages aloud to people with sight impairments, Braille browsers that translate text into Braille, hand-held browsers with very little monitor space, teletext displays, and other unusual output devices.

As the variety of web access methods increases, adjusting or duplicating websites to satisfy all needs will become increasingly difficult (indeed, some say it’s impossible even today). Following standards is a major step towards solving this problem. Making your sites standards-compliant will help ensure not only that traditional browsers, old and new, will all be able to present sites properly, but also that they will work with unusual browsers and media.

Some consequences of ignoring standards are obvious: the most basic consequence is that you will restrict access to your site. How much business sense does it make to limit your audience to only a fraction of those who wish be a part of it? For a business site, denying access to even small portions of a target audience can make a big difference to your profit margin. For an educational site, it makes sense to allow access not only to affluent, able-bodied school-children with graphical browsers, but also to children in regions with poorly-developed infrastructure who are best served by text-only browsing, or disabled students using specialized browsers.

The same principle applies to all types of websites — while straying from the standards and taking advantage of browser-specific features may be tempting, the increased accessibility which comes from standards-compliance will lead to far greater rewards in the long run.

3.2 Stability

Most web standards are generally designed with forward- and backward-compatibility in mind — so that data using old versions of the standards will continue to work in new browsers, and data using new versions of the standards will "gracefully degrade" to produce an acceptable result in older browsers.

Because a website may go through several teams of designers during its lifetime, it is important that those people are able to comprehend the code and to edit it easily. Web standards offer a set of rules that every Web developer can follow, understand, and become familiar with: When one developer designs a site to the standards, another will be able to pick up where the former left off.

http://www.webstandards.org/learn/faq/#p3

i dont see much, point, mys site isnt validated just cos the **** host puts faulty ads on it. theyre badly coded or something.

True, and look at all the 'big' sites they are not validated.

Personally i don't see the point! The web world is expanding so fast nowadays that it's hard to tell what is valid....

thats why hard job is for browsers ...

Valid pages, in most cases, display well on mobile devices compared to invalid pages. I use my phone to surf the web a lot, and it's really fustrating not being able to get to certain sites cos the designer couldn't be bothered with standards...

It's not hard to make sure even the most complicated sites are valid enough to display on mobile devices. Take my site - www.inoxia.co.uk - it's not completely valid, but it works fine on my phone.

Actually more and more corporations are seeing that XHTML CSS and valid website design can serve a large client base. Some of the most recent sites to make the switch include MSN, Quark, Opera, and lots of others. I think as web developers continue to push for standards and companies see the benefits of standards based design, we are going to see more and more of them.

Kaiman

Storm King Design
Storm King Computer Consulting

Standards are a god send.

Imagine if for all the browsers out there we had nothing solid to aim for such as W3C standards.

Your life would be hell and html css etc would be whatever the browser vendor wanted it to be. How could you keep up with that without a central standard as an aiming point.

Without standards things quickly become what people want them to be, which is ok for you but probably not for me or him or her.

And minaki is correct a web browser is not the only medium to display web pages and if you want them pages to be viable to all and sundry then its best to standardise things is it not.

Ibbo

if we went with w3 standards we would be in the future, IE has successfully kept the web back in the 20th century.

W3C standards is an indication of good clean programming with all tags correct.... end of story for me !!

.....not unlike asking "why should my site be viewable/functional in any broswer other than my own?"

Valid W3C means not having to worry if that one big client couldn't actually view your site because they're still using some crappy outdated browser.

Not validating is almost the equivilant of providing flyers written randomly in different languages and just hoping that potential clients happen to recieve the one that they can read.

If everyone can follow the same standards, we won't have problems of some unaccessible websites that can only be viewed in one but not other browsers...

I always give up before completely validating it... its too much work and it really means nothing... Not many people care if the site is valid...

Standards a good thing for every field. Imagine if even 30% of the world ignored the now prevailing standard of TCP/IP. We could still have the arpanet and probably some other various networks. Now imagine if you had to pay for access to each one and each one had something different that you liked. How would you choose? Or would you just pay for all of them?

Standards help everyone in the class be on the same page. I've heard all these arguments before, 9 times out of 10 from young webmasters with very little real world experience. My advice, go ahead and code however you like but don't come around here asking us to fix the mess when all the sudden that obscure browser that no one who matters uses starts to become a player and your site looks like something from 1995 in it.

Just as another little note, I think the argument against standards is not really about whether they matter but whether you actually want to work or whether you want everything to be handed directly to you as quickly as possible.

If you start sticking to standards now, it'll become second nature in future.

If you decide to go for a job in web design, or do sites for large organizations (specially government organisations, etc) you will more than likely be required to work to standards in order for the site to be viewable by those with disabilities.

In fact, in some places, it's illegal for certain sites to not be written to accessability standards.

(FYI, ASP.NET v2.0 is standards compliant right out of the box.)