Only the 4.13% Of the Web Is Standards Compliant
According to a study made by Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA), a tool created by Opera that crawls the web and indexes the markup and scripting data from approximately 3.5 million pages.
Some of the most relevant parts of the study are:
• About 35% of all web sites use Adobe Flash.
• XMLHttpRequest (AJAX) scripting mechanism is used by only 3.2%
• CSS is used in the 80% of the web sites.
• Javascript is used in 75% of them.
• Using the W3C validation tools, shows that 4.13% are valid, which only 50% using the validation badge are valid.
Read the complete article at arstechnica.com
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I actually find this study irrelevant. W3 strict mode shows errors when you are not using alt tags, using target attribute, etc. etc.
Also, even if I hate flash, it’s not bad per-se as long as you have some form of fall-back. Also, it’s not until recently that proper support for audio/video in browsers has started to appear.
Also, the code being “valid” doesn’t really say much about its quality. Just having a bunch of nested s isn’t any better than using tables…
Standard is standard. If all go by it, then it’s a good thing. If nobody goes by it, then it’s irrelevant. Thing is, most sites try to go by the standards, and I’m sore a very bug percentage of those which are not standard compliant are very close. My site, for example, is nearly standard compliant, except for a few javascript hacks for IE and Opera, and the absence of alt attributes in some images. The CSS though, is error-free. Also, I use AJAX :P