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.

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