10 most popular websites in Australian and web standards
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.
- 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 - 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 - 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 - 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. - 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 - 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 - http://www.youtube.com/
There was use of inline scripts and styles, inline event handlers and some tables for layout.
394 Validation errors - 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 - http://www.live.com/
There is use of inline scripts and styles, inline event handlers.
129 Validation errors - 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
June 24th, 2007 at 3:54 am
I actually came to this site having only done minimal work as a web designer myself. I have put together class web pages for some of the college courses I teach, and so may be so much of an amateur that my comments won’t be particularly germane. I am, however, very curious about the basic direction of this post, and in the Web Standards group generally. Can you explain to me why exactly such standards are so important? Is this a situation comparable to building a railway system in a country, where all companies’ rails need to be a standard size so they can eventually link up? Or is this more akin to something like a formatting standard – say MLA or APA or Chicago? If the latter, I’m even more curious as to why this is so vital. Does having a standard format somehow make it easier for others to work on the code of your page, and if so, is that something that page designers necessarily want or need?
September 13th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
It’s weird that google.com comes after msn and yahoo considering that google.com.au is at the top. So, are these sites ranked according to the errors and scripts?
Have you also checked out the most wanted sites based on their CSS or design? I wonder what’s number one in Australia.
January 20th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
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