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."

Comments

Re:How compliant?

[DrSkwid]

It is very simple http://validator.w3.org/

W3C

[eldavojohn]

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:

• Global
• Academic and scientific body
• Multiple interests represented, but mostly from paid member companies
• Attempting to be more open via certain teams such as the HTML5 and CSS Working Groups
• Attempting to appeal more to work-a-day world via redesigns, blogs, and more human-friendly language throughout the site

Cons:

• Creates "open standards" by ideal, not necessarily fact
• Incredibly slow moving in a highly evolutionary environment
• Poor economic model that relies on membership monies
• Discourages independents and open process
• Passive: only creates specs and recommends, does not do real outreach
• "Ivory tower" perception

You should read that article, it's pretty spot on for this subject.

Re:How compliant?

[Bogtha]

only recently added websites or also websites and old pages that exist longer than the standard they validated against exists ?

MAMA didn't validate against a single document type. They validated against the document type that each individual document claimed to be. So all the ancient HTML 2.0 pages out there will correctly be identified as valid in they are, in fact, valid HTML 2.0.

Re:Some standards are just too strict...

[tepples]

It's up to me as a user to choose where a url opens, especially since we are all using the tabbed paradigm now.

User agents currently do not allow the user to submit a form into a new window or tab. This is the nearly nine-year-old bug 17754 on bugzilla.mozilla.org with 99 votes.

Re:strict vs transitional DTDs

[Bogtha]

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.

No, that's something different. There aren't degrees of strictness when it comes to validity. If a document claims to be a Strict document, and makes a single mistake, then it is invalid. If a document claims to be a Transitional document, and makes a single mistake, then it is invalid. In both cases, it's an absolute rule with no laxity.

Re:Well, that depends....

[Lachlan Hunt]

Does using "blink" make my code non-standard?

Yes, because blink is not defined as conforming in any standard. However, it is possible to make a page containing blink (or any other element or attribute you like) pass validation by providing a custom DTD or an internal subset.

But note that the claim that "4.13% of the Web Is Standards-compliant" isn't quite accurate. The study only used the W3C markup validator, which is only able to detect a subset of the machine checkable conformance criteria. It's trivial to create a non-standards compliant page that passes validation.