Who are the W3C?

The W3C otherwise known as World Wide Web Consortium are basically in a nutshell, the standards of web development/practice. It is important to follow the guidelines set by the W3C to ensure your website is both accessible and functions the way you would like it to.

It is vital to have some form of standards for websites to be able to make them accessible to anyone who feels they want to view it. Coding in whichever shorthand, "all over the place", style will lead to inconsistent support across various browsers, obviously making it difficult for people to view your site, how you intended it to be viewed.

What's the Purpose?

The W3C standards do not intend to restrict developers, but to more so put a "border" around things so that everyone can follow some sort of guideline.

The problem occurs when coders start out not complying with standards, and their work becomes a mess in terms of page layout/fonts/colours etc etc across different browsers as a result.

What's my point?

I wanted to ensure that i have tried my utmost to follow these standards, and as some form of "proof", i have included some screenshots of how my website looks across multiple/different browsers, not only from a windows operating machine, but also Linux, Mac and more. In a perfect world, my webpages should look exactly the same on every single different browser. However, if there are some elements in the screenshots that you can see are looking a little "buggy", please be assured that i am working on them. Another contributing factor to why some browsers display a website completely differently to another, will be because of the browser's configuration.

I would have thought that the W3C are striving to one day hope that all browsers will be universally to one standard.
In light of all this, you may notice slight differences in terms of fonts etc, but nothing drastic. Please see here for my browser compatability screenshots. Alternativley, click the link on the left named "browser compatability".

Closing Comment

A point to remember is: just because your page looks nice on your own browser, it doesn't mean it will look the same on another. Web developers/designers are faced with this problem constantly, which is why it is crucial to follow some sort of guideline.