Our goal is to provide visitors to our site with a reliable, predictable experience. In line with this goal, we conform to the W3C recommendations for HTML, XHTML, CSS, and feed formats and validate to other recommendations and standards when available. We check pages on northica.net using the W3C Markup Validation Service and related validators.

A notable exception is embedded Flash content: while suggestions are available for providing Flash content on conforming pages, the pages resulting from these suggestions seem more difficult and possibly more troublesome than helpful. Since browsers handle Flash content in a nonconforming manner that nevertheless tends to meet our goal, we currently choose not to conform with the W3C recommendations when Flash is embedded on a page.