James Oppenheim’s blog

There seems to be some talk about how web standards are becoming common knowledge and consequently being throughly adopted in the development of many new websites. However, I am unsure. While I am a member of the Web Standards Group and I see the use of semantically meaningful code being used on a day to day basis, I don’t believe that the web community as a whole has adopted these practices. Below is a list of the 10 most popular Australian websites according to Alexa.

1. http://www.google.com.au/
   There is no doctpyle, use of inline scripts and styles, inline event handlers, font tags and tables for layout.
   70 validation errors
2. http://www.msn.com/
   This is actually quite good with the use of CSS for layout and semantically meaningful code. However, the source was a bit hard to read because it was all on one line.
   Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict
3. http://www.yahoo.com/
   Lots of inline CSS (the top 2 thirds of the homepage source!), font tags, event handlers and a small amount of tables for layout.
   37 Validation errors
4. http://www.google.com/
   I had trouble getting to the .com because of an Australian IP. However, I can assume it is very similar to the .com.au version.
5. http://www.ebay.com.au/
   There is no doctpyle, use of inline scripts and styles, inline event handlers, font tags and tables for layout.
   162 Validation errors
6. http://www.myspace.com/
   There is no doctpyle, use of inline scripts and styles, inline event handlers, font tags and tables for layout.
   346 Validation errors
7. http://www.youtube.com/
   There was use of inline scripts and styles, inline event handlers and some tables for layout.
   394 Validation errors
8. http://www.ninemsn.com.au/
   There is no doctpyle, use of inline scripts and styles, inline event handlers, and some tables for layout.
   584 Validation errors
9. http://www.live.com/
   There is use of inline scripts and styles, inline event handlers.
   129 Validation errors
10. http://www.wikipedia.org/
    Lots of inline CSS, but there was no tables for layout of inline event handlers.
    Valid XHTML 1.0 strict

While what I have done by no means consists of intense anaysis or testing, it does give a very quick snap shot of the way the 10 most popular websites in Australia have been built. I think the web has come along way in the past few years, but these websites show that there is still a long way to go.

Technorati Tags: Australia, websites, popular, web standards, Web Standards Group, Alexa, HTML validation