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Phillip from Warszawa, Poland"> Phillip from Warszawa, Poland"> By: 
Phillip from Warszawa, Poland
Phillip from Warszawa, PolandUpdated 3 months, 4 weeks ago
Source: http://www.samuelfolkes.com/
Great post, although I have to disagree with a few points. While I do feel that valid markup could be better supported on the top sites you mention, I don’t think invalid code means these sites aren’t supporting web standards.
They are using correct doc types, using CSS for separating presentation from the content , and avoiding using tables for layouts. Which already shows a great deal of support for standards based design practices.
I don’t feel that validation ...
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Showing 41 relevant reactions out of 41.
@SamuelFolkes - An excellent post on the compliance of web sites world-wide with the acknowledged standards: http://bit.ly/34TaS9
Samuel
I largely agree with your interesting post.
I really don’t understand why web designers continue to fail to produce compliant code and why many try to defend this!
Three thoughts (in no particular order!):-
(1) Pages with compliant-code often receive much better results in search engines, so why pay for web designers who damage your chances of being
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You raise some excellent points. However, one thing to note: the W3C X/HTML validators do not accurately validate the specifications. As an example, the specifications actually allow for arbitrary attributes for any given element; the validators do not, and will flag these as errors. If we cannot depend on the tools, how can we possibly expect the browsers to follow suit?
You forgot to mention Wikipedia, which is ”one of the largest, most popular…” .
Wikipedia is a semantic and markup model.
I think you'll agree that standards are better, though...
Hey Sam!
Respectable article, but the one thing I’d say is that the FCC sure had an easier time setting a standard when there were at most 50 radio stations (if so many). Like most things in this world, development of pages with valid Markup is driven by cost. How much time does it take for a youtube.com developer to produce perfectly valid markup and what additional benefits does this
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Samuel Folkes. Samuel Folkes said: On SamuelFolkes.com: Web Standards Compliance (Or The Lack Thereof) http://bit.ly/kk1Uh [...]
Web Standards Compliance (Or The Lack Thereof) http://bit.ly/3qB3uS
Also of concern is that both Yahoo.com and Youtube.com, both websites in the top 10 most visited websites in the world, are using HTML 4.01 markup which on the 24th of December this year will be a 10 year old specification.
It’s a shame that you spoil an otherwise good post with this. The age of the spec is irrelevant, particularly given that XHTML 1.0 (which you seem to prefer) offers
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The "web" isn't even a program.
yet, somehow, we go on living.
the validator often shows up errors for various minor reasons. After validating a site once people rarely go back and validate the site again.
@Phillip – While I agree that markup validation isn’t the only factor to be considered I strongly feel that it is one of the key factors. I am aware that some pages on my site are not valid and frustration with some of the plugin authors for WordPress was one of the motivating factors for writing this post. The digg, dzone and retweet widgets are the culprits and it annoys me a great deal ... See all content
[...] Web Standards Compliance (Or The Lack Thereof), it’s very hard to produce valid markup… Tags: css, rails, ruby, security, webdesign Comment (RSS) | Trackback [...]
Reddit/p: 13 of the largest, most popular in the world serve us webpages containing invalid markup http://bit.ly/giqFh
I would rather browse a site with invalid markup than read the words "epic fail" another time.
You just made me do it! Epic fail at preventing "epic fail" reading!
Loving the "I'm a tough guy, who cares about invalid mark-up!" attitude here... Some of these things are pretty blatant.
Forgetting to XML/HTML-escape an attribute value? Of course I'll forget, _all the time_, that's why I man up and just use something like `printf` to generate markup.
What will a browser do when I ask it to `getElementById` and I have two elements with the ID I
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http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.samuelfolkes.com%2F2009%2F10%2Fweb-standards-compliance-or-the-lack-thereof%2F
33 Errors, 11 warning(s) of your own blog
That says more about standards than about those webpages.
Guy with horrible code on a word press blog criticizes 13 largest web sites in the world.
News at 11, don't miss this one!
> webpages should not be designed for browsers, they should be designed to meet predefined standards!
Except then no normal people can actually view your webpage properly..
I'd rather have a properly working webpage than one that is standards compliant. Yay.
Standards compliant is the way to a perfectly working webpage. Anything else is a road to madness. Firefox is get updated again (probably in the next month), and that update will change the way they to layout. Same for Konqueror, Safari (not to mention the million users of webkit, all on slightly different versions), Opera, and IE. While you can expect the major layout changes will wait for a large ... See all content
The fact that this is news proves the uselessness of striving for valid HTML.
Changed my downvote to an upvote because: people need to get over invalid markup. If you aim for valid markup and then have to invalid it to make JS or something work, that is totally acceptable. Case in point: Google.
Google has terrible HTML because every byte counts when you serve billions per day though thousands of servers. There were a bunch of articles of google's html optimization.
we all know why the google search page doesn’t adhere to the standards: every byte counts. they’re a special case.
the others? not so much. i agree they should try harder.
um … one thing i find interesting: try running this page through the validator: 33 Errors, 11 warning(s)
You seem to be forgetting the most important aspect, the price.
A simple when served hundreds of millions of times ends up being Mbs of bandwidth. If it’s possible to miss out a few tags while having the same rendering and save thousands of dollars per year in delivery costs, wouldn’t you do it too ?
http://bit.ly/3qB3uS LOL EPIC FAIL
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by SamuelFolkes: On SamuelFolkes.com: Web Standards Compliance (Or The Lack Thereof) http://bit.ly/kk1Uh…
webpages should not be designed for browsers, they should be designed to meet predefined standards!
I disagree on both counts, webpages should be designed with the user in mind. If omitting some ‘required’ tags can allow a smaller page (or whatever it may allow) , and a better average user experience for all of the site’s users without any loss in content/interface, who cares
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Try the google home page: [39 Errors, 2 warning(s)](http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0).
Mostly obsolete attributes from earlier versions of HTML.
Exactly. Validators complain about things like
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
Actually if you have an ancient website that originally worked with IE3 and NS4 it is full of things that modern browsers still support but predate the official standard. In this case scripts default to Javascript on anything. Only IE supported VBScript as an alternative. Still the standards way
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I don't know if this is the reason many of the sites (or even if it's the reason for google) don't pass, but I do remember an article on Google about compressing page size: http://code.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-html.html that might cause issues with strict standards compliance but still render properly.
Errors for http://www.samuelfolkes.com = 3
First thing I did after reading: "I am a stickler for standards." was fire up the W3C validator and plug in the URL of the blog post.
With that said if you site only has minor issues and isn't throwing IE into quirks mode then why bother. If it really was an issue then I'm fairly certain those 13 websites would follow standards.
Yeah, but on that particular page: [33 Errors, 11 warning(s) ](http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.samuelfolkes.com%2F2009%2F10%2Fweb-standards-compliance-or-the-lack-thereof%2F)
I almost the whole thing.
Great post, although I have to disagree with a few points. While I do feel that valid markup could be better supported on the top sites you mention, I don’t think invalid code means these sites aren’t supporting web standards.
They are using correct doc types, using CSS for separating presentation from the content , and avoiding using tables for layouts. Which already shows a
...
See all content
On SamuelFolkes.com: Web Standards Compliance (Or The Lack Thereof) http://bit.ly/kk1Uh
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