W3C compliant code????

I have been doing webdesign for quite some time, and I always make sure my designs are cross browser compatible, and test them with I.E., firefox and safari before publishing them, however recently, I did a W3C cehck on one of my sites, and it failed horribly!

Is this a problem, I mean technically speaking, if my sites work in most of the major browsers, why do they need to be strictly W3C compliant as well?

Thanks,
WebMekanix

I've found that making your sites W3C compliant helps make your templates cross-browser compatible, it's really not a necessity since CSS can fix any errors that might be created by the non-compliant coding.

Good to know . I've just started hacking a few old site's coding to bits to update em with more compliant code.

I like compliancy because it shows to me that the webmaster has put in the effort to make his site up to internationally accepted standards. It also helps for compatibility.

You have to remember not everything that views your page is a browser. It could be a screen reader for a blind person, a robot of some sort (search engines) and any number of other devices.

Complying with W3C standard helps you be the most compatible with all of these devices because (hopefully) these devices are also complying with standards.

It's not perfect but it's good a practice.

If it's not W3C compliant than it's not very semantic, clean and wouldn't work in a lot of the older browsers.

As JJMac said not everything will be a browser.

It's like a house. You can build it not to standards, and it might look alright, but its never going to stand forever.

So is it important? Yes, if you take pride in your work.