The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was created in October 1994 to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. W3C has around 400 Member organizations from all over the world and has earned international recognition for its contributions to the growth of the Web.

The new Web language that CWU is using for its Web pages is XHTML, a recommendation by the W3C. XHTML is a combination of HTML and XML, which is useful now and for the future. XHTML pages can be read by all XML enabled devices and while waiting for the rest of the world to upgrade to XML supported browsers, XHTML gives you the opportunity to write "well-formed" documents now, that work in all browsers and that are backward browser compatible.

So how do you know if your pages are correctly coded and "well-formed"? With the W3C's free online MarkUp Validator.

1. Go to the W3C Validator Website.
2. You will be given two options to validate your page. (1) If your Web page is already online, you can validate the by inserting its URL into the first text box. Then click Validate URL.
   
   Or you can validate a Web page that is still on your local machine by browsing to it in your second text box and clicking on Validate File.
   
   We would suggest that you validate your pages before you upload to the Internet. This way if you find errors, you can fix before you throw the page online.
3. If your page is NOT valid XHTML, fix your errors on the line numbers that display in the W3C report and then revalidate. If you have problems correcting the error, contact Jesse Days at (509) 963-2810 or via email at: daysj@cwu.edu.

1. The Web Design Group (WDG) also provides an online HTML/XHTML Validator Website, which is capable of validating multiple pages within a directory.
2. It works exactly like the W3C Validator, except to batch validate, click on the "Validate Entire Site" checkbox.