State of the Validation 2002
02.22.2002

Link(active as of 10/27/06): http://www.markokarppinen.com/20020222.html




Friday, 22 February 2002 . .The World Wide Web Consortium was created 
in October 1994 to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by 
developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its 
interoperability. w3c has more than 500 Member organizations from 
around the world and has earned international recognition for its 
contributions to the growth of the Web.. . www.w3.org

Based on the statement above, it would be understandable to assume 
that the w3c member organizations are on the forefront of web 
standardization efforts. I've had, for some time now, a sneaking 
suspicion that this wasn't the case. So today I've confirmed my hunch.

*   *   *

As it happens, out of the 506 w3c members, only eighteen have web 
sites that validate with the w3c validator as either html or xhtml. 
141 members proudly display sites with definite markup errors; a 
whopping 342 sites couldn't be tested at all because of lacking the 
required doctype definitions. Sad.

To highlight the effort that goes into making an interoperable web 
site, I've included a link to each of the valid sites below, 
in alphabetical order:

    * CiTEC
    * CNR - Instituto Elaborazione dell'Informazione
    * Enosys Markets, Inc.
    * Equal Access Testing Pty Ltd.
    * Innosoft International Inc.
    * Joint Info. Systems Comm. of the UK Higher Ed. Funding Council
    * Library of Congress
    * Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    * MITRE Corporation
    * Opera Software
    * PiroNET AG
    * Ravisent Technologies
    * Royal National Institute for the Blind
    * Trintech
    * U.S. National Library of Medicine
    * University of Edinburgh (HCRC Language Technology Group)
    * University of Helsinki
    * XQRL, Inc.

I haven't seen anyone measure the standards-compliancy of web sites on 
a larger scale, therefore I have no idea what the general situation is. 
I do consider the w3c membership to be quite representative of today's 
"big business", however, and this is why I also find this validity 
data interesting. I will repeat this experiment in six months or so 
and see where we're headed.