What does it mean to you to have your site validated WC3

I'm currently working on a few sites and each one is WC3 approved. I get this:

"Congratulations, this document validates as HTML 4.0 Transitional!"

And I check my CSS with the validator and get no errors or warnings.

So what does all this mean to me? I have no clue yet. I think technically I won't get as many suprises with other browsers if my site is validated? Are there any bragging rights to this? I see redhat.com displays the WC3 logo but microsoft.com can not be validated.

Why should webmasters struggle to get their sites validated What are your thoughts on this? Does it make you a better webmaster to have that logo displayed on your page?

In theory, HTML is not a way of displaying data but a way of storing it in a structured way. So the browser worries are a purely practical matter. The official HTML specification is XHTML which requires correct syntax. Since W3C standards are currently respected by all companies (even M$), it can't be too wrong to comply with the standards to ensure compatibility with the browsers.

I think it is important to implement the current standards as much as possible and to convince others to do so to improve the coding style on the web (currently dominated by Frontpage, which isn't compatible to anything) and to help the browser programmers support all pages, resulting in the ultimate benefit for the user and the programmer - the ability to view all pages with one browser and to get structured, content-oriented pages.

Basicly, if you have a HTML 4 validated web site, you have a site that is coded according to HTML 4 standard. Which a accomblishment on it's own, since most of all web sites in the internet are flawed. The opening of the NN showed that most of the browser internals are fixing the errors made by the programmers. Without such handling, most of the web sites in the internet would collapse and go haywire.

The validation is very important, especially if you are writing pay-for sites. Lets take a few examples, Google.com: why is so plain looking? To make it cross-browser/platform friendly.If you make a eBusiness site, you have to make sure follows most of the HTML standards. In those cases, IE, NN, Opera, and Gozilla users, will all be able to browser through it without diffeculties.

These days validating is pretty cheap and easy. There are many excellent programs that validate sites. But in my opinion, most of the work should be done by programmers. So we, who do this for living, should know how to do it without validators. It's part of hours job and extremely neseccery when you write a dynamic site, where 80% of the page is created dynamicly. I am yet to see a validator that would know how to parse PHP, Perl, and ASP to see if the result is a valid HTML standard.