The W3C is the group that defines the standards that make the web — particularly standards such as HTML, XHTML, XML, and other stuff like that. Its membership reads like a Who’s Who of government agencies and hi-tech companies.
Which is why it’s a little embarrassing when someone actually goes out and sees how W3C standards-compliant the membership’s web pages are, and discovers they really aren’t, very.
The second biannual survey, conducted by Helsinki, Finland-based Web designer Marko Karppinen showed that only 21, or 4.6 percent, of 454 member sites Karppinen could access passed the W3C’s own HTML validator, which tests for grammatically correct HTML.
Now Micro$oft I can understand, because, hey, Bill never met a standard set by a group that he didn’t want to set differently himself — even if he was part of the group. But for the rest of them … well, bad show.
The main reason for the violations tends to be wanting to tweak the standard tags and structures to do cool things, to make HTML behave in non-standard but still (usually) workable ways. They can get away with it because the browsers that are used aren’t always standard, either — and with IE dominating the browser world (85-95% of the market), it makes sense (and sometimes is necessary) to do things in a non-standard (i.e., Micro$oft) way.
Funny thing, that.
heh.
good to know, when my snobby programmer friends sniff over my meager efforts…
The W3C is the most useless concatenation of crackerheads since the inception of the U.N. What good are web standards if you don’t have a standardized browser? I have never run one of my sites through a validator and I never will.
Whenever I have run the W3 validator on my pages (several times over the past eight months) I get instructions, which when followed either:
1. render the site unreadable or
2. produce the opposite instruction upon revalidation, i.e. first I’m told a certain tag doesn’t belong, when I remove it I’m told that same tag is missing…
Cool.
I have a great love of standards. But your point, Stacy, is precisely correct. Though I mutter curses under my breath at M$ and Netscape’s obstinacy in simply going their own way, regardless of whether it “breaks” things.