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Only 4.13% of the Web Is Standards-Compliant
Death Metal writes "Browser maker Opera has published the early results of an ongoing study that aims to provide insight into the structure of Internet content. To conduct this research project, Opera created the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA), a tool that crawls the web and indexes the markup and scripting data from approximately 3.5 million pages."
...on which standard the designer chose.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Depends on how strict they're being.
For example, I never close paragraph and line break tags, but otherwise my html is compliant.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
OMG 4.13% of the Web is Standards-compliant!?
W3C's validation tools
Normally I'd go on my own rant but I'm feeling lazy today and recently I read a good article at A List Apart that sums it up. As for the W3C, I like this list they compile:
W3C's Pros & Cons
Pros:
Cons:
You should read that article, it's pretty spot on for this subject.
My work here is dung.
I wonder if they're throwing away every page that doesn't fully comply or if they're actually including the pages that almost comply but have a typo or missing doctype or missing closing tag. I'm guessing the former by the numbers which seems a little unfair to me.
Silly rabbit
...the rest just renders perfectly in IE.
(i would prefer if there wasn't any truth in it.)
For example, xhtml-strict does not include support for "target" attributes in links. What kind of idiotic decision was that?
So, people then choose xhtml-transitional, which is much more relaxed, etc.
Another thing is the inclusion of embedded xml inside html, which due to lack of support in the standards, completely break "standards-compliance", whatever that means.
Now, if you're talking about DOM, then that's another story.
Why is this a surprise? We are limited by non-standards compliant browsers.
Unfathomable amounts of development time has been wasted over the years trying to set sites running and usable in multiple browsers.
To complicate the issue, over the last few years there has been an explosion in the number of browsers on the market. It is really no fun navigating this modern tower of Babel.
If I had one wish that would be granted, it would be that all browsers would be compliant to a standard. Literally millions of man years in development time could have been saved if this issue was somehow nipped in the bud earlier on.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
Some seem to find this funny, but I don't think this is funny at all. It is actually very sad. I used to be a huge IE fanboy until I learned some w3c standards. All my websites are now 100% w3c validated. People should wake up. Well, not people but "webmasters/developers". This is a serious issue.
Although, one big problem might be the huge marketshare of IE6 in many corporates and homes. I wish we could somehow get rid of IE6 very quick. IE7 isn't perfect, but it's MUCH BETTER than IE6.
This is pretty annoying. We already have to deal with grammar nazis, now we're dealing with standards nazis? When will it end!?
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
This is sad. The situation is even worse in some non-English web domains.
Why can't the web stick to something simple? 95% of the sites I use, would be fine with just plain simple HTML 2.0. Instead, we've got javascript, CSS, XHTML, and other buzzwords. Which in the end, take control of how a web page looks from the user's hand.
I like to read text, on a monitor, green on black (or white on black). I would like to format a web page the way I want to see it.
The vast majority of the web is simple formatted text. There is no reason for this to constantly evolve onwards and onwards.
"Come to MAMA!"
1. the web is still evolving, the standards keep changing. no pressing need to lock things in
2. it is superior design to have a browser that gracefully degrades rather than being and brittle and refusing to render everytime someone forgets to close a <p> element. not simply because of nonstandard pages, but for a whole host of other reasons, including handling partial transmissions
3. the strength of the web is open participation, low barrier to entry. hobbyists should publish, and this is a good sign. hobbyists should not expected to be anal retentive standards zealots
complete standards compliance should always be low on the web because this is a sign of a HEALTHY internet, because it means nonprofessionals are contributing content. this is always a good thing, this what made the internet a powerful nw form of media in the first place. if ever there were some sort of gatekeeper organization or rigorous technical specification that enforced standards compliance, you would raise the barrier to entry onto the web by regular joes. you would reduce the variety of the web, make it more monoclonal, and hurt a vibrant ocmmunity
low standards compliance is not only a complete nonissue and not a problem, its a good sign. the lower standards compliance is, the better for us all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You're telling me the DHTML clock that follows your cursor isn't entertaining?
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
But what about the porn?
I think the step from ASCII-girls was a big improvement.
Yay for vid pron!!1!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Only about 4% of web sites are HTML-standard compliant. So what?? Will the world come to an end??
This standards-nazi attitude is what, IMHO, will always keep Opera from becoming a major browser. When Joe Sixpack finally learns about Opera, decides to give it a go, and realizes a few sites don't look as good in Opera as they do in IE, he'll simply go back.
The W3C is kind of like the UN, it dictates the rules, but has no firepower to enforce them (that's where Microsoft comes in).
As much as I love Opera I find myself going back to IE (rather, FF with IE Tab ext.) about 20% of the time. Not to mention my work intranet which is totally designed for IE.
No Really.
Come to think of it, the main use of all of these "junk standards" is to drive commercials on various sites.
All the major browsers are vying for top dog in creating a smiley face where there was once colorful blurs...And now is colorful flashy rainbows!
The problem is html is so non restrictive that you can be high and create a "good" website. It also doesn't help that a lot of web developers are "high" school kids/drop outs and community college grads :P What I'm saying is that as long as companies hire cheap labor (those mentioned) companies will get cheap results.. simple as that.
SUMMARY:
You get what you paid for. Nothing more.
Are there degrees of strictness?
Yes. HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 each have two DTDs: a "transitional" DTD that allows presentational elements and a "strict" one that disallows them. The trouble is that a couple structural elements and attributes got removed by mistake in the strict DTDs along with the presentational ones, most notably the value attribute of the li element. For this and other reasons, most valid HTML that I've found has used a transitional DTD.
So Webmasters are not human? I've often suspected that.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
./ is mostly text, but how did you post this comment? Any Page refreshes?
Actually it uses some pretty sweet AJAX calls.
Progress usually comes from ignoring standards.
Does it mean that 94% of websites did not find the standard useful?
Or perhaps that the standard is poorly presented, causing fewer people to be aware of it?
My personal leaning is that the standards body lost control of their 'standards' a long time ago, but they haven't realised yet. The only real thing most web devs care about is 'does my site/application run as required in the browsers I need it to?' If the answer is 'yes, if you don't follow the standard', then the standard is ignored.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ftech.slashdot.org%2Farticle.pl%3Fsid%3D08%2F10%2F16%2F1325215&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
If Slashdot shows up with 28 errors, would you really expect anything at all out of the non-technical media?
You only need to make one mistake in your markup to be non-compliant. I would be interested to see what the degree of failure is for the other 95.87% of sites. My website, Wii Fit Forum currently fails on six counts, all just simple errors in the code which I plan to fix. But currently, the site displays just fine, so I have more important things to worry about. I think this is the same for many publishers.
Unfortunately for the novice, the ignorant, the lazy or the just plain error-prone (the last two are me), the W3C and the browser industry do not make it that easy to be compliant.
HTML standards are the current prime example of the old joke "the great thing about standards is that there are so many of them". The W3C really needs to stop pissing around with all this semantic web crap, and concentrate on making what is already there work better.
We need a single standard which embodies all the best elements of the existing ones in a coherent form, and then the browers manufacturers need to get their arses in gear and implement it properly. The novice developer is currently confronted with a mish-mash of alternative doc-types, each of which has different pros and cons, and which may or may not work properly depending on your browser. It needs to be done soon, not over a ten year timescale.
When you can stop worrying about whether your site will work in various browsers, then people will spend more time on compliance. Until then, people will worry about the important things, such as their readers being able to see their site properly.
I know I should treat standards with more importance, but while the current mess persists it is hard to care.
Paul Leader
When they don't work with the tools (various browsers).
Better to build a website that works, than one that meets standards but display poorly in the browsers of your users.
Ask yourself this simple question. If it does not look good in the browser, is your client going to accept "Well it's coded to standards!". Heck no...
I wish we could somehow get rid of IE6 very quick.
Install End 6 on sites that you maintain, and the first time an IE 6 user visits your site, a pop-up will suggest Opera, Safari, Firefox, Flock, or IE 7.
The best thing for you to do is to provide your own CSS file and tell firefox to use it rather than anything provided by the website you are visiting.
This will style all sites similarly, and will work great for sites that atleast have well-structured HTML. Sites that at least have properly structured HTML are much more common than sites which are standards compliant.
Overclockers
Errors found while checking this document as HTML 4.01 Strict! Result: 23 Errors, 1 warning(s) Address: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/16/1325215 Encoding: iso-8859-1 Doctype: HTML 4.01 Strict Root Element: HTML
...if the majority of authors don't abide by it. Silly propeller-heads.
If you go to the source of the research, you will for example notice that the last time a similar study was done (in June 2006), only 2.58% of the tested pages validated completely. A 1.5% increase might not seem to be all that much, but it's definitely indicative that we're on the right way. (And of course, perfect validation is never the final goal in itself, but merely an easy first step for people en route to writing better, semantically-meaningful, universally accessible websites.)
Inconceivable!
unfortunately the vast majority of the web would not exist if it had to meet your standards. People don't create content for free... well the majority of them don't.
Copywriters cost $100/hour + and nobody wants to pay that much if the copy being written is going to go online into a format that amounts to a high school term paper.
Also nobody wants you to have the power to view their content the way YOU want to. They pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a web site that communicates their content the way THEY want it communicated.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Now if only they could get MAMA to automatically scold the people that aren't compliant
Annoying behaviour by web developers who think no one could possible want to, god forbid, leave their site in favor of another site.
There are times when it can be appropriate. When it's absolutely needed however (read: the boss wants it that way) I'll use a mini icon to give a visual cue that it opens in a new window.
Reply to That ||
So override with a stylesheet that looks roughly like:
* {
color: #0F0 !important;
background-color: #000 !important;
}
div {
display: block !important;
float: none !important;
}
and you'll be all set. The rest of us tend to like looking at something that doesn't resemble a terminal window all day long. There's a reason that browsers provide the ability to override stylesheets and disable javascript. CSS, JS, and all of that other stuff don't take the presentation layer away from you (in fact, they make it a hundred times easier to override rather than the inline styles of old), they just provide defaults.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
...the rest just renders perfectly in IE.
...the rest just renders perfectly in IE. (i would prefer if there wasn't any truth in it.)
To be honest, most of the rest also renders perfectly on Firefox.
The sites that don't are mostly Microsoft and online banking sites. But who cares about them? *sigh*
1.) When the majority of browsers start supporting standards, so too will developers. Now that is not to say there aren't browsers that support the standards. But I have found that I can write a site that meets standards 100% (fairly difficult to do) but to get it to work in IE I have to hack. When I am done hacking it to work in IE, I am probably down to somewhere in the 50-65% compliance range. So your options are typically: be standards compliant and screw IE users. OR you can support IE users and screw standards. IE6 just makes this 10X worse too...lets retire IE6
Does it matter even to Joe the Plumper or Joe Six Pack?
No, for real that was a serious question.
If Joe Newb goes to his favorite website (using his default browser) do you actually think he even knows that it might not look like it is suppose to?
This whole compliance war makes little or absolutely no difference to Joe Average. You can argue that he should care about it but within 2 seconds you would have talked circles around him and he will just tell you "but this website looks fine to me and that is all I care about."
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
1. jpeg is a old cold hard standard. its not evolving. additionally, its a very limited spec: it involves static images. no more. the web is anything goes, anything you can write up in an sgml flavor, encode, and stuff into http, standards constantly evolving. comparing jpeg to the web is like comparing a carrot to the entire vegetable kingdom. orders of magnitude of difference in dimensions of description
2. lots of the coolest stuff you can do with webpages involve things that are far outside any standards. like ajax. or howabout youtube: enocding videos as flash. these are things that evolved on their own, outside of any standards committee. in fact, they used proprietary technology from microsoft and adobe at first. not only that, they used proprietary technology in innovative ways that the technology wasn't meant for. microsoft's early ajax-like code was meant to be an outlook extension. adobe's flash was meant to describe simple animations, not video encoding. but if one appreciated the power of the idea of ajax or video encoding in flash early, and wanted to play with it, as a hobbyist, you could. and why shouldn't they? a hobbyist is supposed to wait for standards to keep up? a hobbyist is supposed to wait until someone writes a brain dead point and click interface before tinkering? you think the web is better without youtube or google maps? of course you don't. but that's what your jpeg allegory is trying to tell us about standards and the still evolving web
what innovation means, and how its fits into the picture, and how innovation works, has nothing to do with standards. on the contrary, its the thematic opposite of standards compliance. innovation comes first, and then a long time later, standards comes along and consolidated the best practices that were discovered as innovative technologies move from the cutting edge into mainstream mundane use
what you don't do is get in front of innovation, and write standards for it before people innovate. that's insane. no one is so omniscient as to know what the next great leap forward on the web will be, and when it will happen, and what format it will first manifest itself in. no one says "i'm going to write the spec for encoding video on a webpage before it happens, and everyone is going to fall in line behind me, and everyone is going to use brain dead point and click interfaces to make that happen." actually, some people did try to do that. look up vrml (virtual reality markup language) from the mid90s, amongst many other examples, of standards trying to come before innovation. it doesn't work. its not how technology evolves
but this is what you expect us to appreciate if your jpeg allegory is supposed to be instructive to us about the relationship between the jpeg spec and webpage specs
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The problem is the W3C and "standards advocates" are chasing the wrong problem. They view the problem like this:
- Standards = Proper structure. Correct use of syntax. Cross your t's, dot your i's and leave it to the browser to decide how a page is rendered.
Worse, this "who cares how it is displayed on the browser as long as you get the syntax right" is considered to be a feature by these types! The rest of the world, all 95.87% of them, don't think of "Standards" that way. For the majority, standards means only one thing:
- Standards = Looks and Behaves the same on all browsers.
The longer the W3C denies the majority definition and continues to dismiss the importance of a standard way of browser behavior, the longer they remain in the wilderness. The W3C will be the minority until they define how web browsers should *render* a page so that HTML *looks* the same regardless of browser.
And before you shoot back to me and carry the W3C talking point "it is up to the browser to determine how to render and dammit, it is a feature not a bug", remember that this very article asserts you are the minority.
Either accept that the majority of us want browsers to display a page the same way, or continue to be dismayed when nobody cares about your standard.
Instead, we've got javascript, CSS, XHTML, and other buzzwords. Which in the end, take control of how a web page looks from the user's hand.... I would like to format a web page the way I want to see it.
You should love CSS, XHTML, and Javascript, then.
With CSS, you can change the entire look of a webpage without changing the markup. Most browsers will let you load your own custom CSS. Without CSS, people would be using FONT tags, which you have significantly less control over.
And Javascript allows for things like bookmarklets, or better, GreaseMonkey. You can write or download a script which does, well, whatever you want to a given page, as you view it. One I've been playing with recently adds a "download MP4" link right into the middle of every YouTube page. Off the top of my head, if you really hate my post, and don't want to see any more comments from me -- I'm not sure if Slashdot itself allows this, but you could write a Greasemonkey script to do it.
The vast majority of the web is simple formatted text. There is no reason for this to constantly evolve onwards and onwards.
Simple formatted text can look better.
And, like it or not, the Web is an application platform now. What you're saying is kind of like wishing computers never evolved beyond calculators.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Nowadays making sure your site is valid HTML is easy. Just install the excellent HTML validator plugin for Firefox. It gives you a tick or cross icon on each page; double-click the cross to view the page source with a list of errors. It does the validation locally on your machine, not sending the content off to some server, so it's fast.
If you're writing dynamically generated pages it is a great way to find bugs in your code, and it's unobtrusive enough to leave it turned on all the time.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'm really not sure what your comment about AJAX calls has to do with "ignoring standards" -- especially given that:
- XMLHttpRequest is a standard
- It was always possible with a hidden iframe anyway, which is also a standard
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Google.com isn't even standards compliant
Why can't the web stick to something simple? 95% of the sites I use, would be fine with just plain simple HTML 2.0. Instead, we've got javascript, CSS, XHTML, and other buzzwords. Which in the end, take control of how a web page looks from the user's hand.
I like to read text, on a monitor, green on black (or white on black). I would like to format a web page the way I want to see it.
The vast majority of the web (that this user likes to view) is simple formatted text. There is no reason for this to constantly evolve onwards and onwards.
Face it, you are the minority. Hell, most people here on Slashdot are the minority. First off, CSS, XHTML, and Javascript aren't buzzwords. They are technologies (AJAX is a buzzword... but it's still pretty cool). If a web page doesn't control how it looks who is? The user? Listen closely... MOST PEOPLE LIKE THINGS THAT LOOK NICE AND DO COOL THINGS. THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO WANT TO READ MONO-COLOR TEXT FOR ALL INFORMATION OUT THERE IS VERY MINIMAL. If you don't need any of it, browse without stylesheets, images, and javascript turned on.
The Amish get by just fine without electricity and things like that, but they don't try to fool themselves into thinking that nobody should have it, just because they don't want it.
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
The real flaw is the underlying philosophy that the standards, HTML/CSS, should never get to make assumptions on how a page is rendered by a client. This philosphy, a core value of the W3C, says that as long as you the website author do not get to dictate how a page is rendered.
Unfortunately, this core value is at odds with what the industry is demanding. The industry is demanding there be a *standard* for how a page is rendered. The attitude is now "screw the 'standards' as long as it works in all the browsers". And clearly this attitude is the majority, or more people would be following the W3C standards. Worse for the W3C, people are now routing around their standards by using Flash and Silverlight, both of which render content in the same manner regardless of browser.
I hold that until the W3C rethinks their long held value that it is up to the browser to decide how a page is rendered, they will be unable to meet the needs of a rapidly changing industry.
Every one is interpreting this wrong. I'm sure they were talking about political, not web standards. And it looks as though the porn industry just got a lot larger.
Microsoft - The best ad campaign Apple ever had.
Another thing you have to compare between back then and now is the total number of websites there are entirely. A 1.5% increase to the same number of total websites may not seem like all that much, but if you consider how many new webpages have likely appeared in the past two years, that's a significantly larger number.
BLINK will validate. To my eternal shame I've used it on my Home site's humour page and it passes w3c validation (just checked it to make sure). P.S. please don't slashdot me!
Smivs on the intertubes!
Save the developers! have a nifty bit of script which generates a drop-down when it detects I.E.6 being used, which urges the user to upgrade. It's subtle and inoffensive. I add it to all my sites.
Smivs on the intertubes!
Here's Opera's article, with actual numbers:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-markup-validation-report/
What an arrogant approach! Based on recent figures I calculated that 1/4 million people are using Opera (I'm one of them) in the U.K alone, and many countries have a higher percentage than this. And Safari users are probably even more numerous. Your clients are asking you to design sites that will piss-off millions of people world-wide. Good plan!
Smivs on the intertubes!
you wouldn't have a job. you would be fired and replaced by a point and click interface your clueless boss would use
do not belittle browser incompatibility, it keeps you employed. it means you have special rare expensive expertise, rather than common cheap expertise
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
1) If 95% of the world doesn't follow a spec, then it's not a standard, it's a guideline at best.
2) Who's actually used Opera? It's so unstable as to be completely unusable. If you start with something as simple as Google News' home page, and just start clicking stories, you'll find that it crashes on about every third web page for one reason or another. This is my most recent experience with Opera 9.6 on Vista, YMMV.
This study is a not-so-subtle way of "explaining" why their browser only works 5% of the time, not a critique of any adherence to so-called standards.
Do you mean "compliant" or "conformant"? There is a difference.
I like to read text, on a monitor, green on black (or white on black). I would like to format a web page the way I want to see it.
This is what user style sheets are for. By using !important (in particular), the user can override the styling (see also the spec). Something like this might do the trick:
* {
background: white none !important;
color: black !important;
}
As far as making a user stylesheet is concerned, this might help you with that.
Does the fact that 95.87% of the web is not "standards compliant" make being not compliant the Standard?
Of course, if the browsers had been standards-compliant, perhaps it might have encouraged the siteowners...
No tags needed here. Just plain old text.
At a fundamental level, the issue is one of literacy. People who are functionally illiterate -- a sad state within a supposedly advanced civilization -- require devices and techniques that go well beyond the ordinary printed word. The illiterate need pictures to convey even the simplest of ideas and this is the major reason why the Web has proliferated to its current state of inane animations and flashy visual thrills. Such presentations are very costly in terms of bandwidth and storage, but, as with the passion plays of the Middle Ages, pandering to the illiterate masses is an unfortunate necessity.
It is therefore inaccurate to state that "MOST PEOPLE LIKE THINGS THAT LOOK NICE AND DO COOL THINGS." The preference for such methods is directly related to the level of literacy. The correct expression would be: "MOST PEOPLE, BECAUSE THEY ARE SADLY ILLITERATE, *REQUIRE* THESE EXORBITANT VISUAL DEVICES TO BE ABLE TO GRASP EVEN SIMPLE MEANINGS."
Rejection of the current state of the Internet is not a rejection of progress or technology. It is only the outrage of the refined and sophisticated to the unschooled methods of functional barbarians.
is more commonly known as innovation
you're like a guy complaining that the different railroad companies all use a different track gauge so you have to keep retrofitting the rail cars you build
i'm sorry progress is messy. but there are no standards, because the web is still evolving. standards cannot get in front of innovation. standards must naturally follow behind innovation, and consolidate
in 30 years, maybe it will be all the same, and then your complaints would have some validity. but right now, your complaints are hollow, because you simply don't understand the historical context in which your job exists. you work in an evolving, fluid specialty. you're not a plumber, working in a field that has existed since the romans, and all the pipe sizes are standardized
so stop complaining. what you complain about is completely unavoidable, and is the flip negative side of a much greater positive that makes your job even possible: technological innovation and creation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
and some guy told you tables were frustrating to work with, and instead why not put everything in nested divs, and describe the different classes of styles of the different divs in an external file, so as to effect easy modification of rendering in one change rather than going into every td element and changing the test alignment to left rather than center, for example, would you have deducted points for not following the standard way to render tables?
if not, you understand my point about the proper relationship between messiness, innovation, and standards
in 30 years you would be dead on. but the web and its standards are still evolving. as such, messiness reigns, and is a sign of creative ferment, which is a good thing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually, yes, I have the crappy /. AJAXy stuff turned off, so it properly POSTs my form and does a "page refresh".
Tell me again why this is A Bad Thing[tm]?
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
about the hobbyist tinkerers who used a microsoft outlook component to do partial page refreshes, eventually creating what we now know as ajax?
hobbyists are not brain dead morons following the pack. they lead the pack
in fact, those overly obsessed with standards compliance represent a sort of brittle, uncreative mind that is in fact the brain dead morons who trail at the bottom of the pack. everything must be in a straightjacket, or they can't deal
creativity trumps all of your observations. standards follow innovation, not the other way around
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Basically, once the appeals court overturned the antitrust decision, it was pretty much game over. Microsoft has had virtually no need to improve on IE, because most users are not technical, they just understand that they click on the "Internet" icon and they're "on the Internet", for whatever that means. More than once I've had people panic because "their Internet has changed" - i.e. after they somehow click the "upgrade" button and got IE7 instead. The comforting Microsoft messages upon IE7 installation did little to help, considering I live in a non-English speaking country.
Until something finally kills off Windows, or the new generation who's grown up with computers comes up, I don't see how it's going to change.
On that day I will download a photo of Gates, print it out on photo paper, burn it and celebrate. In the meantime I just try to make my pages W3C compliant and display their banner.
The very purpose of standards is to make "Working" a property of a website. It is a shame that the world let M$ kill standards.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
You're obviously not a web designer .. IE which version.
Pages that render perfectly in any one version are by no means guaranteed to render properly (or even usably) in any other version. Possibly with the exception of IE7 and IE8 when in IE7 rendering mode; but not fully tested that assumption yet.
1. a webpage is not a c program. a c program HAS to be anal retentive to work. out of millions of lines, one misplaced ascii character and the whole thing is mud. a webpage meanwhile is just a bit of aesthetic markup, it can degrade, it can degrade heavily, and it is still worth something
2. you're complaining about different track gauges in the dawn of the age of railroads. i would expect that engineers who had to build rail cars a century and a half ago would complain about customizing every car for 5 different gauges. however, that's the way innovation works, its messy. standards do not get in front of innovation, innovation leads and standards trails behind, consolidating. now, today, all track gauges are standardized. and, in a decade or two or more, all webpage markup will be standardized. but not while we're still innovating in that area in the time we exist in: its still the dawn of the internet in 2008. so your complaints and your perspective are perfunctory and premature, outside of an understanding of proper historical context. they would be true uttered in 30 years time, but your words are not true today
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why can't the web stick to something simple? 95% of the sites I use, would be fine with just plain simple HTML 2.0. Instead, we've got javascript, CSS, XHTML, and other buzzwords. Which in the end, take control of how a web page looks from the user's hand.
Why can't actors stick with something simple - 95% of films I see could be performed in the round without sets or ornate costumes. Instead we have special effects and costumes and makeup, specialist lighting, post production colouring, fancy-smancy cameras, stuntmen and other needless hollywood stuff. These in the end take control of imagination out of the user's hands.
---
In the end it's both an informational, entertainment and advertising medium and anything used in other media gets it's version in this one.
i am recognizing chaos is undeniably part of the mix. we are still innovating in markup. what do you think ajax is doing to how webpages are customarily handled, in a fundamental way? you think we've figured out html and css and that's it, end of story, no further changes?
this is what i know about chaos, and what you must learn: standards do not lead, and then innovation follows. no, messy innovation leads, and standards follow behind, consolidating
the chaos you perceive is the creative ferment that makes the entire internet as we know it possible. its not some junk and noise, its the process of creation. it is more important than standards
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The rest are designed to work with MS IE.
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!
better analogy: in the early days of the railroad, there were many different track gauges. this made life hell for railroad car engineers who had to retrofit all of their designs. eventually, one gauge won out and standardization took place
and there WERE a lot of car crashes in the early days of automobiles due to reasons that would be stupid today. and there WERE a lot of cases of botulism in the early days of canning
the point is, in the early days of technology, there is no standardization. innovation leads, standardizaiton follows, consolidating. not the other way around
the chaos you see me advocating is rather the chaos i see as simply an inevitable part of the process of innovation and technological creation. its unavoidable, and you don't standardize it up front, you standardize it later. your entire perspective on the issue is wrong and backwards
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why not serve your content as application/xhtml+xml and use xhtml. Your browser will choke if it incurs any validation errors.
And yes IE will properly render xhtml with a little work - http://www.nealgrosskopf.com/tech/thread.asp?pid=1
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
I presume you mean submit the form and have the form page stay open and the submission complete page show in a separate tab/window. Not sure how useful that is (you can page back to view a forms submitted content in FF)
Imagine a web page with two forms: one for search and one for composing a long text. I want to display the search results while keeping the text area open. This has happened to me dozens of times while editing Wikipedia articles.
What percentage of the web is even frequently visited? I'd say that the average user uses 1% of the internet (or less), the question is how much of that 1% coincides among people; then you might see that a much much larger percentage of websites that are actually relevant will be standards compliant.
Probably because 95.87% of the web is Internet Explorer compliant.
a bunch of random crap being flung on the wall, having no idea what will stick. and out of the mess comes... us, homo sapiens
do you think that the guy who took an obscure ms outlook component and used it to do partial refreshes of webpages knew he was creating ajax? could you, in the late 1990s, have looked at what that guy was doing and you would have perceived with absolute omniscient clarity such a groundbreaking innovation? could he even?
there is no purposeful effort, its blind fumbling. progress is nothing more than a mistake at first, that is recognized eventually to be better than the "right" way to do things. its like asking if fleming knew what he was doing when he screwed up a bacterial culture and discovered penicillin
simply put: your understanding of what innovation is is flawed. innovation very much is a process of people having no idea what they are doing. those messy fools you perceive are like that guy working for cern 20 years ago spending WAY too much time with markup (aka, tim berners-lee). you think he knew what he was doing? you think he woke up and said "i'm going to pave today the way for perhaps the most earthshattering form of media mankind has yet invented"? no, he was just trying to share research. nothing purposeful about what his work did.
"Most of the people don't know what they're doing, and they're certainly not innovating."
the invention of the internet was EXACTLY that: a bunch of people, in small steps, having no idea what they were doing, and innovating. innovation is the exact opposite of how you perceive it
as for what i put faith in, yes, absolutely, i put faith in people at large to innovate, as a group. on an individual basis, 99% of them are idiots. but there is absolutely no way you, me, or anyone else can differentiate between insane ramblings of an idiot, and the next great technological innovation. because neither of us, nor anyone, is omniscient
so you respect the mess, because you have some humility about where you really are in the process. you don't have control over it. no one does. or at least, you should learn that humility
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Iframes are invalid in xhtml strict.
The rest is FaceBook and Myspace pages.
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Are you really arguing that plain text is the most efficient way of expressing all ideas? Are you really saying there is no communication value to sound and images?
Sure there are a lot of people misusing multimedia, but does that make it an invalid form of communication? Try to show some knowledge of usability outside your own personal preference.
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
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People who use IE are often quite happy with it. They don't need to be beaten over the head with Firefox ads.
So are heroin addicts as they shoot up. Being advised to use Firefox is an intervention.
XMLHttpRequest is now a standard since everyone decided to "ignore standards" and use it anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest
"The World Wide Web Consortium published a Working Draft specification for the XMLHttpRequest object's API on 15 April 2008."
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Page refreshes:
1) cause more data to be transmitted which is slower
2) cause more cpu cycles by re-rendering the whole page on your client
3) all of this probably uses more electricity
4) wastes time
5) kills baby seals
6) causes markets to crash
7) makes you lose bids on ebay
it would be better if i could fly by flapping my arms. it would be better if i had a billion dollars. none of which describe reality, nor have you. innovation does not proceed in the way you describe. its messy. wouldn't it be neat if innovation were clean and standardized? yeah, of course. except it never will be, so what you say is pointless
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
of course new stuff is built on what comes before. but that observation of yours doesn't banish messiness. in fact it neatly describes the nature of the mess: weird random accretions on what works fine and is standard
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wonder... if the answer had been 3.14% would the crawler have become trapped in an infinite loop?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
If it looks alright in major browsers, who cares?
its early in the age of the locomotive, and there are 5 different track gauges. the engineers who have to retrofit 5 different track gauges onto their railcar design are obviously perturbed by this. it will 30 more years before one track gauge is standard. thats the flipside to innovation
you can prevent little boys from breaking windows. but there is nothing you will ever do that will make technological innovation a clean and orderly and standardized process
in 20 years, all browsers will render the same. until then, stop looking a gift horse in the mouth. you are mistaking the irreducibly messy process of innovation with common vandalism. you fail at choosing the right parable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Interestingly, the site that posted the news fails validation (the story, the frontpage).
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
do you honestly expect raising the barrier of entry to webpage publication will result in a better web? no, it will result in a smaller web, of dreary sameness. i applaud the hobbyist who knows nothing and starts churning out what you perceive as crap design. he's creating
the value of the web is in its noisy cacophony of creation, not its fascist adherence to some page standard
life is messy. deal with it, or go grow a small little moustache
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
your html teacher is explaining how to make tables
you tell your teacher its a straightjacket, that you'd rather work with nested divs, and describe the divs' styles in external files, for easy changeups
"but that's not standard" the teacher replies
yes, positive, useful, helpful creation is not standard
an emphasis on adherence to standards is the path to technological stagnation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I tried their STUPID validator a while back on some HTML code I wrote by hand, and it wouldn't stop complaining about invalid markup. First about some doctype COMMENT (which of course it didn't provide a valid template for) and then it went on to nitpick every single line pretty much. Fuck that. I'm sorry <P> isn't good enough, but the HTML code in question works on everything, including Lynx.
You want some valid HTML? Here you go:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Title</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>Some text</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Guess what web browsers that code is compatible with? ALL OF THEM. =D
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
if someone makes an unreadable page, no one will read it
that's all the consequences that are needed
there is no need for a standards body to stand there poopooing them. in short, compulsory adherence to standards is some sort of game that has no real value in increasing the quality of the internet, but merely an exclusionary principle that serves to reduce webpage quantity, and some kinds of quality that fall outside of a narrow standard
its useless and pointless, to emphasize standards, when they are still evolving. until they stop evolving, let the mess be, in spite of your psychological compulsion to order things. it gets in the way of innovation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"yo MAMA so fat she took 3.5 million pages up the a$$!" – wait, that IS what "analysis" means, right?
Then suddenly many managers would go "i need this standards thing, NOW !!"
To conduct this research project, Opera created the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA), a tool that crawls the web and indexes the markup and scripting data from approximately 3.5 million pages.
After a thorough examination of over 6.2 websites worldwide, my Mama determined that 7.31% of all statistics are merely improvised and presented using unnecessarily sophisticated syntax.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
How can something be "standard" if only 4.13% of the net complies with it?
First off, I'm surprised it took 15 bad/ignorant comments before someone mentioned W3C.
I know how hard it is to stay standards compliant while maintaining a site that is constantly evolving. Not to mention the hacks that need to be put in place to make a site cross-browser friendly. IE came a long way toward standards compliant when it hit version 7 (6 was a nightmare), but they still haven't made it.
I would say, if in this study standards compliant refers to a 100% compliant page (transitional not strict) then almost all mine are but they neglect to recognize that the majority of the internet domains are kited my marketing firms that throw auto-generated pages up to get click-revenues. I doubt any of these are standards compliant, since the quality of a kiting portal is insignificant as long as it generates $.
I would say that this study falls under the guidelines of all studies, it has a value to 100-value range of error (ie 95.87%). First, because they didn't specify the level of compliance (strict, transitional, etc...). Second, because they only tested an insignificant sample of the internet. Predictive math will always me just that, predictive. Algebraic formulas don't make it so unless you're talking about environmental ohms law.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.splorp.org%2Findex.php&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
Although the Tidy function of the HTML Validator program is a bit too picky about empty tags. It's still valid, dammit.
Please don't humanize the morons around me. It makes me very uncomfortable.
I is "Client"...
Simply showing the text is not acceptable. We want it to display the same in all browsers, and in the past few versions too.
It "all" depends on the task, the client, etc.
Not saying don't strive for standards when possible, and coding to be accessible, etc. But I am not sure there is any browser that currently exists and renders "perfectly" to ALL standards.
Hence, we compensate...
***
Note definition of standards vary, and we all may be talking about differing aspect of standards. ;-)