What does it mean to be W3C-compliant?

OK, time-out for some education. What is W3C compliance?

The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and since 1994 (that's waaay back) the W3C has provided the guidelines by which websites and web pages should be structured and created. They set the standards by which best practices in web design are defined and followed through according to the type of coding used, whether it's HTML, XHTML, XML (blog feed), CSS etc.

OK, time-out for some education. What is W3C compliance?

The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and since 1994 (that's waaay back) the W3C has provided the guidelines by which websites and web pages should be structured and created. They set the standards by which best practices in web design are defined and followed through according to the type of coding used, whether it's HTML, XHTML, XML (blog feed), CSS etc.

(Strangely, W3C reminds me of the United Nations. Who still listens to them these days?)

If not for W3C standards, nothing that you read on screen would be intelligible. One of the main challenges that Tim Berners-Lee, the so-called Father of the World Wide Web, had to face up to and solve during W3's formation is to ensure interoperability and that data is not lost in translation as they are presented on-screen.

It is still quite a big issue among webmasters today. From personal experience, I had designed sites without thinking how people would view them in FireFox. If you don't care for these folks, you lose a market share, simple. (Part of the problem is that proprietary features that do not conform to any existing W3C specifications are designed into popular browsers, so life become very difficult for those of us attempting to create websites that look good across most, if not all, browsers and platforms, screen sizes and resolutions and overcome most types of visual disabilities.)

I surprise myself on looking back, that it took me a significant amount of time to realize from an Internet Marketer's point-of-view, when designing a website, you need to bear in mind that visitors ONLY respond in 3 ways:

1) To click on a link.
2) To opt-in.
3) To purchase something.
4) And only 1 WAY AT A TIME.

The last point is terrifically important. I recall seeing a website with black background with lots of links, blinking graphics and bright banners. It reminds me of Las Vegas. If I fly to Las Vegas for the first time and not knowing anything about the place, I wouldn't know where to start enjoying myself. That's the problem with such sites. Everywhere is a shout, yet there is still no obvious call to action.

Thus the principle is: the more obvious a "call to action" is, the simpler the site must be. It must simply scream, "DO THIS." And when a site is made simply, I presume it cannot veer too far from W3C specifications. Look at Microsoft.com. Did you think it's W3C-compliant or bloated with excess code? It's a chicken-and-egg problem for the webmasters at Microsoft if they are pressed for time (so as a result, do not pay careful attention to making their site more lean. Looking at their history of software patches, one may make an educated guess of how they work.)