Alex "top 100" w3c markup validation result

[J. C. Denton]

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.

They are

http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/

All others should go w3c markup hall of shame, ;-)
--
Consultants for hire
http://www.rent-a-pro.com/

[Kim André Akerø]

J. C. Denton wrote:

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.
You know, that might be a sign of having too little to do. Business
going slow these days?
They are

http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/
Of those two, I would've never thought the first one would validate,
considering all the HTML bugs their own browser is willing to accept.
All others should go w3c markup hall of shame, ;-)

I see that veterans and giants such as Google, Netscape, Yahoo!,
Amazon, BBC, AOL, CNN and IMDb.com are on that top 100 list. You'd
really think these would know better, wouldn't you agree?

And for those who are wondering where the heck that list is, look here:
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sit...obal&lang=none

--
Kim André Akerø
- ki******@NOSPAMbetadome.com
(remove NOSPAM to contact me directly)

[Rijk van Geijtenbeek]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 14:32:52 +0200, J. C. Denton <jc******@blackhouse.gov>
wrote:

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.

They are

http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/
A big hurray for Microsoft everyone!
All others should go w3c markup hall of shame, ;-)

All others in the Alexa Top 100 that is. Still, 2% valid sites in the top
100 is probably a big improvement - I dare say these two are the first
ever in the top 100 to validate.

BTW, I note that IBM.com is valid (XHTML 1.0 Transitional), sun.com is
invalid, and mozilla.org is invalid due to a missing </a> tag! The last
result is a surprise for me... None of these sites are in the top 100.
--
Get Opera 8 now! Speed, Security and Simplicity.
http://my.opera.com/Rijk/affiliate/

Rijk van Geijtenbeek

[Martin Honnen]

Rijk van Geijtenbeek wrote:

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 14:32:52 +0200, J. C. Denton
<jc******@blackhouse.gov> wrote:

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.

They are

http://www.microsoft.com/

A big hurray for Microsoft everyone!

But they use the obsolete HTML 4.0 instead of HTML 4.01. And
transitional markup is nothing to get excited about. In particular when
browsers like Mozilla or Opera or even IE 6 render it in quirks mode.
--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

[Spartanicus]

"Rijk van Geijtenbeek" <ri**@opera-dot-com.invalid> wrote:

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.

They are

http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/

A big hurray for Microsoft everyone!

Humph, ... humph, ...... humph.

--
Spartanicus

[Andy Dingley]

J. C. Denton wrote:

I [...] find only 2 sites that pass validation. http://www.microsoft.com/

As IE must be a major target for them, one wonders why they even
bothered.

[Rijk van Geijtenbeek]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:25:21 +0200, Martin Honnen <ma*******@yahoo.de>
wrote:

Rijk van Geijtenbeek wrote:

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 14:32:52 +0200, J. C. Denton
<jc******@blackhouse.gov> wrote:

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.

They are

http://www.microsoft.com/

A big hurray for Microsoft everyone!

But they use the obsolete HTML 4.0 instead of HTML 4.01. And
transitional markup is nothing to get excited about. In particular when
browsers like Mozilla or Opera or even IE 6 render it in quirks mode.

The mindset and attention to detail that is required to keep a website
consistently valid, whatever the DTD chosen, is something to applaud. On
MSN.com they also try, but fail. Look also at mozilla.org to see that is
is easy to fail... It is a pity the MS scripting guys are not yet with the
program. MSN.com is riddled with script tags using document.write.
Start.com is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, but uses IE-centric scripting that
fails in Opera).

--
Get Opera 8 now! Speed, Security and Simplicity.
http://my.opera.com/Rijk/affiliate/

Rijk van Geijtenbeek

[Blinky the Shark]

Kim Andr? Aker? wrote:

J. C. Denton wrote:

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.

You know, that might be a sign of having too little to do. Business
going slow these days?

They are

http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/

Of those two, I would've never thought the first one would validate,
considering all the HTML bugs their own browser is willing to accept.

4.0 transitional, note.

And of course that's only one page.
--
Blinky Linux Registered User 297263
Killing All Posts from GG: http://blinkynet.net/comp/uip5.html

[Blinky the Shark]

Rijk van Geijtenbeek wrote:

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 14:32:52 +0200, J. C. Denton <jc******@blackhouse.gov>
wrote:

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.

They are

http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/

A big hurray for Microsoft everyone!

Death by boondah! Death by boondah! :)
--
Blinky Linux Registered User 297263
Killing All Posts from GG: http://blinkynet.net/comp/uip5.html

[Stan Brown]

On 28 Sep 2005 13:37:15 GMT in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html,
Kim Andr?Aker? favored us with...

J. C. Denton wrote:

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.
http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/

Of those two, I would've never thought the first one would validate,

Maybe the home page validates, but I'll lay long odds the others
don't.

Let's see -- the first "microsoft.com" bookmark I've got is
<http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/> and it fails with 11 errors.
<http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307856> fails with 32 errors.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200..._wont_help_you

[Gérard Talbot]

Rijk van Geijtenbeek a écrit :

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 14:32:52 +0200, J. C. Denton
<jc******@blackhouse.gov> wrote:

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.

They are

http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/

A big hurray for Microsoft everyone!

All others should go w3c markup hall of shame, ;-)

All others in the Alexa Top 100 that is. Still, 2% valid sites in the
top 100 is probably a big improvement - I dare say these two are the
first ever in the top 100 to validate.

BTW, I note that IBM.com is valid (XHTML 1.0 Transitional), sun.com is
invalid, and mozilla.org is invalid due to a missing </a> tag!

Rijk, I have personally converted about 100 webpages of mozilla.org site
to HTML 4.01 strict and have removed at the same time all the validation
markup errors. I can correct that missing </a> easily. Gimme 30 min. and
it's done.

The last result is a surprise for me... None of these sites are in the top 100.

The fact that Netscape fails and has been failing for years is more
criticable considering they said + commited to support web standards.

For the record:

"Microsoft is committed to working with the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) to implement W3C-approved HTML standards, and has confirmed its
pledge to work through W3C and other standards bodies on enhancements to
HTML and other key Web technologies."
http://www.microsoft.com/standards/intro.asp
but they removed that file about 3 years ago

"Microsoft is working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to help
ensure interoperability and support for users on multiple systems with
different browsers."
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...l/dhtmlovw.asp

NETSCAPE OPEN STANDARDS GUARANTEE
"We will adopt the major open standards recommended by the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other appropriate, vendor-neutral
standards bodies, such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Object
Management Group (OMG), ECMA, and others."
http://wp.netscape.com/comprod/colum...standards.html

Gérard
--
remove blah to email me

[Gérard Talbot]

Rijk van Geijtenbeek a écrit :

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 14:32:52 +0200, J. C. Denton
<jc******@blackhouse.gov> wrote:

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.

They are

http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/

A big hurray for Microsoft everyone!

As mentioned by others, transitional DTD is not like strict DTD which
triggers a rendering mode correctly implementing the CSS 1 box model in
MSIE 6.
Also, that microsoft.com page may actually be one of the rare which is
entirely valid. 99.999% of all examples, code samples, pages, code
snippets at

msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/

would fail a validation test and are either without doctype decl. or
with a doctype decl. which will not trigger standards compliant
rendering mode in MSIE 6.

Also, that page still is a good demonstration of general bad coding
practices: table design, over-constrained tables, at least 20 CSS
parsing errors, lots of deprecated attributes, weird href attribute
values (all starting with "?"), some of the dynamically generated markup
is clearly invalid (1), valid but non-conformant chunks of code, etc.

For all these reasons, the page is still bloated, long to load, could
load a lot faster, could be slimmer, more compact, more accessible, etc.
(1):
<script type="text/javascript">var AdHtml='<iframe frameborder="0"
scrolling="no" marginheight="0px" marginwidth="0px"
allowtransparency="true" style="background:#F1F1F1" width="120"
height="240"
src="http://rad.microsoft.com/ADSAdClient31.dll?GetAd=&PG=CMSIE4&SC=F2&AP=1164"> <'+
'/iframe>';document.writeln(AdHtml);</script>

All others should go w3c markup hall of shame, ;-)

All others in the Alexa Top 100 that is. Still, 2% valid sites in the
top 100 is probably a big improvement - I dare say these two are the
first ever in the top 100 to validate.

BTW, I note that IBM.com is valid (XHTML 1.0 Transitional), sun.com is
invalid, and mozilla.org is invalid due to a missing </a> tag!

I just tried to correct that missing </a> error but it seems I don't
have sufficient powers/rights to do so. :(

Gérard
--
remove blah to email me

[Leonard Blaisdell]

In article <3q************@uni-berlin.de>,
Gérard Talbot <ne***********@gtalbot.org> wrote:

I just tried to correct that missing </a> error but it seems I don't
have sufficient powers/rights to do so. :(

Surely you have enough power to get the Mozilla folks to listen. It's an
embarrassment to them to have their page invalidated by something so
simple.

leo

--
<http://web0.greatbasin.net/~leo/

[Spartanicus]

Gérard Talbot <ne***********@gtalbot.org> wrote:

As mentioned by others, transitional DTD is not like strict DTD which
triggers a rendering mode correctly implementing the CSS 1 box model in
MSIE 6.

Quirks mode is not triggered by a proper transitional doctype.

--
Spartanicus

[Sherm Pendley]

Gérard Talbot <ne***********@gtalbot.org> writes:

weird href attribute values (all starting with "?")

What's weird about that? Isn't that simply a relative link that resolves
to the same URL with a different query string?

sherm--

--
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net
Hire me! My resume: http://www.dot-app.org

[Gérard Talbot]

Leonard Blaisdell a écrit :

In article <3q************@uni-berlin.de>,
Gérard Talbot <ne***********@gtalbot.org> wrote:

I just tried to correct that missing </a> error but it seems I don't
have sufficient powers/rights to do so. :(

Surely you have enough power to get the Mozilla folks to listen. It's an
embarrassment to them to have their page invalidated by something so
simple.

leo

It's entirely valid now:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...line&verbose=1

Gérard
--
remove blah to email me

[Norman L. DeForest]

On 28 Sep 2005, [utf-8] Kim André Akerø wrote:

J. C. Denton wrote:

I just manually validated alexa's global top 100
sites and find only 2 sites that pass validation.

You know, that might be a sign of having too little to do. Business
going slow these days?

They are

http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/

Of those two, I would've never thought the first one would validate,
considering all the HTML bugs their own browser is willing to accept.

All others should go w3c markup hall of shame, ;-)

I see that veterans and giants such as Google, Netscape, Yahoo!,
Amazon, BBC, AOL, CNN and IMDb.com are on that top 100 list. You'd
really think these would know better, wouldn't you agree?

And for those who are wondering where the heck that list is, look here:
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sit...obal&lang=none

I would be interested in seeing the page of theirs that has a link to
that list to see if it is broken. Do they have this broken URL?

<a href="http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none">
some label here</a>

or do they have the correct URL as in this?

<a href="http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&amp;lang=none">
some label here</a>

Note that &lang; is a left angle bracket (with the semicolon optional if
the next character is not a letter or digit) and Lynx (or other conforming
browsers) will treat the "&lang" in the URL as such if the ampersand is
not escaped as a character entity. I encounter way too many broken sites
with that error.

--
``Why don't you find a more appropiate newsgroup to post this tripe into?
This is a meeting place for a totally differnt kind of "vision impairment".
Catch my drift?'' -- "jim" in alt.disability.blind.social regarding an
off-topic religious/political post, March 28, 2005