Only 5% Of Websites Mark-Up Validates Says Opera.

There is no doubt that validation standards are good for usability and accessibility to handicapped people. However how many websites actually validate? Many businesses who are starting online now want their website to validate. They may think that all website validate and this is just standard. In this article I will discuss Opera’s findings which will help business see the shocking results.

Validation standards or the W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) was formed by Tim Berners -Lee to bring standards to internet mark-up in the use mostly of XML and HTML. In a perfect world every website would confirm however they don’t.

With HTML simply to learn by almost anyone mistakes do happen as they may not learn it correctly and this can result in mark-up failure. Opera’s MAMA project researched how many websites validate. The tested 3,509,180 URL’s in 3,011,661 domains and the results were alarming. The result was that only 4.13 percent of the websites tested actually passed. Google has indexed over 1 trillion different domains and if you work on averages you can then deduce the total amount of domain that actually validate. This is around 41 billion URLs.

MAMA also tested the amount of webpage’s that displayed the validation badge and found that about half of all WebPages that displayed this badge actually failed the validation process. What this shows that this badge can in a lot of cases show inaccurate validation. This can be caused by WebPages being updated and not checking if their code still validates.

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Another interesting fact is of the companies who are actual members of the W3C only 1 in 5 of their website actually passed the validation. This proves that we have along way to go before we can really trust the sites that display this badge and validation standards in general. With technology changing all the time the goal post are always moving this make me think of the joke poster I seen once that said this “Web standards, Just when your compiling we’re changing them”. This is true and who knows what the future holds for web standards we will just have to wait and see. In the mean time I really wouldn’t worry about it just try and concentrate on creating websites with good content and make them as accessible as it they be to everyone.

Author

Jack Mack

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