Only 4.13% of the Web Is Standards-Compliant 406
Death Metal writes "Browser maker Opera has published the early results of an ongoing study that aims to provide insight into the structure of Internet content. To conduct this research project, Opera created the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA), a tool that crawls the web and indexes the markup and scripting data from approximately 3.5 million pages."
Only 4.13% of the Web Is Standards-compliant ... (Score:5, Insightful)
(i would prefer if there wasn't any truth in it.)
Surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfathomable amounts of development time has been wasted over the years trying to set sites running and usable in multiple browsers.
To complicate the issue, over the last few years there has been an explosion in the number of browsers on the market. It is really no fun navigating this modern tower of Babel.
If I had one wish that would be granted, it would be that all browsers would be compliant to a standard. Literally millions of man years in development time could have been saved if this issue was somehow nipped in the bud earlier on.
Re:How compliant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that a bit like saying, "my C code fails to compile whenever I pass it the flag for strict ANSI checking, but other than that my code is ANSI C compliant"?
Re:I wonder if (Score:1, Insightful)
Why is it unfair? If you're going for compliance for a good reason, a missing doctype or tag could be pretty serious. Try and run a page with a missing closing tag through a parser other than a web-browser once and see how minor an issue it is.
If you're going for compliance just because you can, it's not big deal, but you're still non-compliant.
Re:Some standards are just too strict... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well not in the least bit idiotic actually.
It's up to me as a user to choose where a url opens, especially since we are all using the tabbed paradigm now.
Sad. Even sadder is the yet-another-feature creep. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is sad. The situation is even worse in some non-English web domains.
Why can't the web stick to something simple? 95% of the sites I use, would be fine with just plain simple HTML 2.0. Instead, we've got javascript, CSS, XHTML, and other buzzwords. Which in the end, take control of how a web page looks from the user's hand.
I like to read text, on a monitor, green on black (or white on black). I would like to format a web page the way I want to see it.
The vast majority of the web is simple formatted text. There is no reason for this to constantly evolve onwards and onwards.
and that's not a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
1. the web is still evolving, the standards keep changing. no pressing need to lock things in
2. it is superior design to have a browser that gracefully degrades rather than being and brittle and refusing to render everytime someone forgets to close a <p> element. not simply because of nonstandard pages, but for a whole host of other reasons, including handling partial transmissions
3. the strength of the web is open participation, low barrier to entry. hobbyists should publish, and this is a good sign. hobbyists should not expected to be anal retentive standards zealots
complete standards compliance should always be low on the web because this is a sign of a HEALTHY internet, because it means nonprofessionals are contributing content. this is always a good thing, this what made the internet a powerful nw form of media in the first place. if ever there were some sort of gatekeeper organization or rigorous technical specification that enforced standards compliance, you would raise the barrier to entry onto the web by regular joes. you would reduce the variety of the web, make it more monoclonal, and hurt a vibrant ocmmunity
low standards compliance is not only a complete nonissue and not a problem, its a good sign. the lower standards compliance is, the better for us all
so what does this tell us about the standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it mean that 94% of websites did not find the standard useful?
Or perhaps that the standard is poorly presented, causing fewer people to be aware of it?
My personal leaning is that the standards body lost control of their 'standards' a long time ago, but they haven't realised yet. The only real thing most web devs care about is 'does my site/application run as required in the browsers I need it to?' If the answer is 'yes, if you don't follow the standard', then the standard is ignored.
Re:W3C (Score:5, Insightful)
That's hilarious. We still can't use CSS tables or generated content on the web - features that were published by the W3C in the CSS 2 specification over a decade ago because Internet Explorer doesn't support them yet. We need to use JavaScript frameworks or otherwise normalise event handling because Internet Explorer doesn't support DOM 2 Events - a specification published by the W3C eight years ago (event Internet Explorer 8 won't support this). And SVG anyone? XHTML? MathML?
Get back to me when browsers make it out of the 90s before telling me the W3C is "incredibly slow moving".
4.13% compliance doesn't really surprise me. (Score:5, Insightful)
You only need to make one mistake in your markup to be non-compliant. I would be interested to see what the degree of failure is for the other 95.87% of sites. My website, Wii Fit Forum [wiifitforum.org] currently fails on six counts, all just simple errors in the code which I plan to fix. But currently, the site displays just fine, so I have more important things to worry about. I think this is the same for many publishers.
Unfortunately for the novice, the ignorant, the lazy or the just plain error-prone (the last two are me), the W3C and the browser industry do not make it that easy to be compliant.
HTML standards are the current prime example of the old joke "the great thing about standards is that there are so many of them". The W3C really needs to stop pissing around with all this semantic web crap, and concentrate on making what is already there work better.
We need a single standard which embodies all the best elements of the existing ones in a coherent form, and then the browers manufacturers need to get their arses in gear and implement it properly. The novice developer is currently confronted with a mish-mash of alternative doc-types, each of which has different pros and cons, and which may or may not work properly depending on your browser. It needs to be done soon, not over a ten year timescale.
When you can stop worrying about whether your site will work in various browsers, then people will spend more time on compliance. Until then, people will worry about the important things, such as their readers being able to see their site properly.
I know I should treat standards with more importance, but while the current mess persists it is hard to care.
What good are "standards" (Score:4, Insightful)
When they don't work with the tools (various browsers).
Better to build a website that works, than one that meets standards but display poorly in the browsers of your users.
Ask yourself this simple question. If it does not look good in the browser, is your client going to accept "Well it's coded to standards!". Heck no...
Re:Well, that depends.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, that depends.... (Score:5, Insightful)
'Looks good in Internet Explorer and doesn't seem to crash Firefox or Opera' may not be a standard, but it satisfies the bulk of most web-sites' customers. I'm a FF user and include myself in that group. I realize that sites are tuned for IE because it's the leader and accept that my browser choice and add-ons sometimes make things look a little funny - As long as they work I don't care. I would guess that most visitors feel more or less the same (slashdot standards nazis excepted).
Besides, if most of a web site's traffic is coming from a browser that doesn't support any standard but their own anyway, what motivation do they have to conform?
Re:Well, that depends.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet Explorer is really the big trouble maker here. Any Professional knows that their site needs to render flawlessly in IE first, Good enough in Firefox, and perhaps workable on others. Following the "standards" bairly leads to this operation as IE so poorly handles the standards that you really need to break them. I am still trying to find the HTML tag that gives IE users an electric shock.
Re:Well, that depends.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't English fun, my compeer?
Re:Well, that depends.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with that attitude is that not so long ago, Firefox wouldn't be in the list, and for many developers (including some I worked with this week) Opera is still not on that list. It's like Internet Explorer only websites, except only slightly laxer. So you use Firefox. Lucky you! How about all the people who use something less popular, e.g. Konqueror? How about all the people who must use something that will never be popular, such as people with disabilities? Shall we just say "tough, get off the web"?
"Working" is not a property of a website. "Working" is a property of a combination of a website and a browser. You can't say that a website "works", only that it works in particular browsers.
Re:Well, that depends.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It is not funny. (Score:4, Insightful)
Serious issue?
Well, yes. Unless you think the Internet isn't important, or that it wouldn't make a difference if the web was controlled by a single person. I think that certainly puts it above "what costume will I wear" kind of serious.
And your sig betrays you -- you seem to take yourself just as seriously as the rest of us take things that actually matter.
I mean, when I go to the bank to cash a check, I don't worry they won't give me money unless I can prove I'm using Firefox at home.
Well, when you go to cash a check, you shouldn't really have to prove anything, other than that you can sign for it.
But I've seen banks that only work on IE. I haven't seen banks that only work on Firefox.
Re:Some standards are just too strict... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you use the target attribute, you have no control over the size of the window and it is very likely that it will obscure the current window. You need JavaScript to get the effect you desire, and if you are using JavaScript, why bother with a new window when you can dynamically display the content in the context of the current page?
Re:4.13% compliance doesn't really surprise me. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well, that depends.... (Score:3, Insightful)
How about all the people who use something less popular, e.g. Konqueror?
Web pages will be tailored to suit the bulk of their traffic. Konqueror will learn to display them properly, regardless of adhesion to standards, or fall by the way-side as users get frustrated. It's not fair, it's not right, and it's not changing. Sorry.
How about all the people who must use something that will never be popular, such as people with disabilities? Shall we just say "tough, get off the web"?
Some pages are practical to conform to people with disabilities. Some aren't. When practical, web-admins should make their pages accessible to the handicapped. Adhering to standards may make it easier to tailor specialized browsers for use, but the fact remains that pages will be written to display properly in the most popular browsers and people that write "unpopular" browsers need to conform to that.
I'll tell you what, why don't you volunteer to re-write all of the flash-games on the web so that blind people can play them? When you're done, I'll assign you some music sites that you can re-code for the deaf.
Should we say "Tough, get off the web"? No. We should say "Sorry, but because of your disability there are a lot of things in this world that you'll never be able to enjoy. We'll try to help you enjoy the rest." Sorry if that sounds heartless, but I'm a realist.
As long as they work I don't care.
"Working" is not a property of a website. "Working" is a property of a combination of a website and a browser. You can't say that a website "works", only that it works in particular browsers.
I should have said "as long as they work for me" as in "as long as when I visit them using my browser with my configuration settings under my OS using my I/O devices they behave well enough that I can use them". I thought that I had successfully implied that. Sorry.
Re:Sad. Even sadder is the yet-another-feature cre (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm really not sure what your comment about AJAX calls has to do with "ignoring standards" -- especially given that:
- XMLHttpRequest is a standard
- It was always possible with a hidden iframe anyway, which is also a standard
Re:W3C (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless Google puts on the page "your browser is an ancient, decrepit, backwards, non-compliant, security-hole-ridden POS. Upgrade now" with links to Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and any other reasonably decent browser.
Re:Sad. Even sadder is the yet-another-feature cre (Score:2, Insightful)
Why can't the web stick to something simple? 95% of the sites I use, would be fine with just plain simple HTML 2.0. Instead, we've got javascript, CSS, XHTML, and other buzzwords. Which in the end, take control of how a web page looks from the user's hand.
I like to read text, on a monitor, green on black (or white on black). I would like to format a web page the way I want to see it.
The vast majority of the web (that this user likes to view) is simple formatted text. There is no reason for this to constantly evolve onwards and onwards.
Face it, you are the minority. Hell, most people here on Slashdot are the minority. First off, CSS, XHTML, and Javascript aren't buzzwords. They are technologies (AJAX is a buzzword... but it's still pretty cool). If a web page doesn't control how it looks who is? The user? Listen closely... MOST PEOPLE LIKE THINGS THAT LOOK NICE AND DO COOL THINGS. THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO WANT TO READ MONO-COLOR TEXT FOR ALL INFORMATION OUT THERE IS VERY MINIMAL. If you don't need any of it, browse without stylesheets, images, and javascript turned on.
The Amish get by just fine without electricity and things like that, but they don't try to fool themselves into thinking that nobody should have it, just because they don't want it.
Re:and that's not a problem (Score:1, Insightful)
"low standards compliance is not only a complete nonissue and not a problem, its a good sign. the lower standards compliance is, the better for us all"
That's asinine. As a developer, I shouldn't have to code something five different ways for five different browsers because they all decided to implement a rule different from one another. I prefer spending my time being productive, not having to try to account for other programmers' screw-ups. To the browser-makers: GET ON THE SAME F'N PAGE ALREADY!!!!
Re:Some standards are just too strict... (Score:2, Insightful)
The trick is making it work for the average or new person, while not screwing it up for the experienced. For this example, if you want the link to open in a new window with a normal click, make sure that middle-clicking on the link doesn't break it.
Re:Well, that depends.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that if the site is built to standards, you don't have to spend a lot of money making that small number of people happy. Their browser is probably built to render sites as the standards specify, and so it'll probably work anyway.
I build web applications at work, and only have to make it work in Firefox, but because I'm using standards, and think about what I'm doing, I can be fairly confident that it's going to work in most other things as well. I have users happily using my apps in some barely known browsers, without problems.
Re:How compliant? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is very simple http://validator.w3.org/ [w3.org]
Actually, not quite that simple. My top-level page currently gives 66 validation errors. Guess how many are from content I've had to include from a third party, where I have no control over their standards compliance? 66 of them - 65 are from WebRing, 1 is from a news feed.
For those of you who are bad at math, that's all of the errors on that page. Note that all my other pages validate just fine, since I don't include third-party content there.
Being part of the WebRing is still important for my site, so I have to live with the 65 errors. Not much I can do about it, so I wrote some code into the PHP to not display the WebRing content if I pass it a flag/option, and I use that flag when I validate since I know I'll get errors otherwise.
If there's a better way, let me know.
Re:W3C (Score:1, Insightful)
Ah yes, incredibly slow-moving and punitive.
IE was the first browser to implement CSS 2 as specced by the W3C, who then, faced with a working implementation from a large company, decided to make major changes to the spec. Microsoft said "sod this for a game of soldiers" and the web we have today is a testament to the W3C's utter stupidity.
Re:Well, that depends.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Tripe.
It's not a standard it's a compromise used by website designers that can't/won't code properly - be that through technical or temporal (ie financial) restrictions.
It's fine to make a design decision that says screw the standards 70% of visitors can view it as I intended and the customer won't know any better. That's up to the individual "designer" (by which term I include Frontpage-monkeys).
But trying to suggest that this is adhering to web-standards, outside of an intellectual exercise in breaking the boundaries of the semantics of the English language, is rediculous [sic].
Re:W3C (Score:4, Insightful)
This is quite simply delusional. Here is the first released specification for CSS 2 [w3.org]. Go and read the tables section. Go and read the generated content section. Go and find out when Internet Explorer had a working implementation of these features. Then go and inform Microsoft, because they, along with the rest of the world, seem to be under the impression that these are new features in the Internet Explorer 8 betas.
In actual fact, there have been changes made to CSS 2 that make Internet Explorer more compatible. For instance, display: inline-block was originally an Internet Explorer proprietary feature that was added to CSS 2.1.
Standards (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Try this. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well, that depends.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, I'm not person who called you a jackass, obviously, but I would say that your argument is not well thought-out. First you, said it's "not fair, not right and not changing" or something like that. That's completely factually incorrect. IE 8 has "compatibility mode" (aka "render this page like IE 6") turned off by default. IE 8 is much closer to standards-compliant than any Microsoft browser that came before it.
What does this mean? It means that Microsoft is taking action to change the current situation. That means that it is changing -- for the better.
Secondly, I believe the person named 'AmberBlackCat' was obviously offended by your insensitivity to the plight of people with disabilities. And so was I. I think you wrong folks with disabilities with your attitudes towards their plight. Wouldn't you want people to be more sensitive to you if you suddenly became disabled? Because it could happen -- one day you walk out on the street and get hit by a driver who wasn't paying attention, for instance.
Note that for certain U.S.-based Web sites, at least, it might even be illegal for say, an e-commerce site to fail to make reasonable accommodations for the blind under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Other countries have similar laws on the books. (IANAL and this is not legal advice, blah, blah)
Re:The real world goes beyond IE and Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well, that depends.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Okay, tell me where the document is that defines and explains how IE renders things. What is that? It doesn't exist?!
You're coding on borrowed time. It's far easier to tweak a standards compliant site that will reliably work in non-IE browsers to work in IE than fumble around with code, hoping that it will display in IE and other web browsers.
Developing to standards ensures that your website will look how you want it to in browsers to come. Browsers you can't test. You have far less chance of this being the case if your code doesn't conform to a well-defined standard.
For the record, I actually practice what I preach, and it works well!
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)