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Only 4.13% of the Web Is Standards-Compliant

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-woulda-guessed-less dept.

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."

8 of 406 comments (clear)

  1. Well, that depends.... by AltGrendel · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...on which standard the designer chose.

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    - Douglas Adams

    1. Re:Well, that depends.... by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Funny

      'Looks good in Internet Explorer and doesn't seem to crash Firefox or Opera' is not a standard.

      --
      My blog
    2. Re:Well, that depends.... by g0dsp33d · · Score: 5, Funny

      But if we completely reverse the standards we should be at 95.87% compliance!

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      lol: You see no door there!
    3. Re:Well, that depends.... by Lachlan+Hunt · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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      By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
  2. More like by ODiV · · Score: 5, Funny

    OMG 4.13% of the Web is Standards-compliant!?

  3. Re:How compliant? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  4. Re:W3C by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Insightful
    • Incredibly slow moving in a highly evolutionary environment

    That's hilarious. We still can't use CSS tables or generated content on the web - features that were published by the W3C in the CSS 2 specification over a decade ago because Internet Explorer doesn't support them yet. We need to use JavaScript frameworks or otherwise normalise event handling because Internet Explorer doesn't support DOM 2 Events - a specification published by the W3C eight years ago (event Internet Explorer 8 won't support this). And SVG anyone? XHTML? MathML?

    Get back to me when browsers make it out of the 90s before telling me the W3C is "incredibly slow moving".

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    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  5. 4.13% compliance doesn't really surprise me. by NoNeeeed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Paul Leader