Various statements been made regarding the present-day state of Standards conforming web sites. Several of these statements offer that nearly all web sites fail conformance requirements which implies that all sites were developed in an era of Web Standards. They weren't. How many sites were developed in the past five years and failed conformance would be more accurate.
Web Standards adherence may have failed but Web Standards has not failed. At least, the intent continues.
Last year, I performed data collection and analysis on behalf of the W3C HTML Working Group. The survey — The W3C HTML WG Top 200 (Alexa) Sites — was valid for the original publication date, 27 July 2007. The Top 200 Alexa sites have changed; it does that. Some have corrected errors and currently pass validation; some have grown worse. Alexa Global Top 500 Validation Research was peformed by Brian Wilson (Opera) in January 2008 against the W3C Markup Validation Service. The sites have repositioned but the results are similar. Nearly all failed.
They are as expected: validation fails on major sites generated from large scale Content Management System (CMS). It seems nigh impossible that these CMS platforms will be able to generate valid code and — since data entry clerks are responsible for content — verify standards validity.
The most recent HTML conformance analysis published was August 2008. HTML 5 Conformance Survey Results. The errors appear predominately to be from legacy sites (that are of little concern for validation in HTML 5 markup language) with small, insignificant errors that are of HTML elements with obsoleted attributes found in table stylings. One-half of all errors seem legacy; one-half seem poor quality review: either during data entry or RTE, i.e., Rich Text Editor, construction.
Regardless.
Each analysis summary shows consistent results: most sites fail validation.
Therein lies the difficulty for Web Standards propagation. Sites fail validation but are rendered sufficiently in browsers. Error handling identifies these errors; error recovery ignores these errors.
However.
Sites may pass HTML/CSS validation but fail User Agent (UA) rendering. Predominately, Internet Explorer (IE) 6 and IE7; but - Occasionally - Opera fails. Sites seldom fail with validated HTML code; IE6/7 chronically fail due to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) much-chronicled CSS rendering deficiencies, i.e., bugs, even after successful CSS validation.
Browsers may render broken code; valid code may be broken by browsers. Browers' modus operandi; Web development's bête noire.
Web Standards will not eradicate noncompliance. Legacy websites will remain noncompliant. Authors and authoring tools will continue to generate noncompliant HTML and noncompliant CSS code. The most common HTML errors are those identified in Spring 2006; and, similarly, present-day CSS errors have not regressed. Further, browser error recovery continues to cause difficulties with audience acceptance and practice of Web Standards.
Nevertheless, Web Standards continues.
Albeit slowly.
[Published date: 26 January 2009]