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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
OMG 4.13% of the Web is Standards-compliant!?
It is very simple http://validator.w3.org/
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
...the rest just renders perfectly in IE.
(i would prefer if there wasn't any truth in it.)
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.
Isn't that a bit like saying, "my C code fails to compile whenever I pass it the flag for strict ANSI checking, but other than that my code is ANSI C compliant"?
My blog
Well not in the least bit idiotic actually.
It's up to me as a user to choose where a url opens, especially since we are all using the tabbed paradigm now.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
./ 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
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.
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
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
XHTML-STRICT is not for everyone, it's intended for those (like me) who are more development oriented and wish to completely separate structure from presentation. A "target" attribute is clearly a presentation attribute since it defines how the linked reference is presented to the user and as the parent noted, it should be up to the user to make that choice.
When wanting to control presentation in XHTML STRICT, you should use DOM or CSS, that way, they structure (XHTML) is removed from the presentation (JS/CSS). I typically link all scripts and stylesheets. That way the XHTML is made portable in terms of data with the JS/CSS being limited to only effecting a web client. In the OPs case, a simple ID attribute for that particular anchor would work just fine, you could bind an event listener for a click event to that element and then execute your javascript popup code when that event is triggered, canceling the event so that the browser does execute the link on it's own. That way, your default browser clients could execute the JS instructions, while a 3rd party app (an AIR desktop or mobile device) could put their own custom behavior in if desired.
While that sort of practice may seem extreme to a designer, as a developer I can swear to it's scalability and transportability for supporting 3rd party access such as when developing a web UI that needs to support many types of clients via one codebase.
If none of those features make sense nor strike you as worthwhile, I suggest you stick to XHTML TRANSITIONAL, which is probably better suited to your needs.
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!