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Microsoft – The Only Ones Following Web Standards!
Thursday, Dec. 22 2005 | Author: AlexTan
I’ve been doing work on a website recently, and I try to always stick to standards set by the W3C. Sure, call me a perfectionist, but following these standards can warn you of possible display errors in the browsers you don’t use. To figure out if your site follows web standards, you can go here. I checked out a list of tech websites, to see if many sites adhered to the standards, the results are pretty surprising.
- Alienware – 48 Errors
- Apple – 6 Errors
- C|Net – 1452 Errors! The most!
- Del.icio.us – 21 errors
- Dell – 131 Errors
- Digg – 7 Errors
- Fedora – 1 Error
- GNU – Complete Failure (encoding error).
- Google – 48 Errors
- HP – 29 errors
- Konqueror – Passed Validation
- Microsoft – 0 Errors What???
- Mozilla – 0 Errors (Finally)
- MSN – 0 Errors What??? Again.
- Slashdot – 200 Errors (Slashdot has a mechanism that prevents you from validating, so I validated a Google cache of Slashdot.)
- Sourceforge – 24 Errors
- Sun Microsystems – 8 Errors
- Suse – 3 Errors
- Opera – 0 Errors
- Redhat – 7 Errors
- Wired – 51 Errors
- Yahoo – 265 Errors Wow.
I’d just like to say kudos to Microsoft. For a company that does so many things wrong, they were actually able to pull off something perfect. Both MSN.com and Microsoft.com adhere perfectly to web standards! Every other company on this list needs to get their act together, especially C|Net with over 1000 errors! If you believe I made a mistake, or have other companies I should add to the list, go ahead and post in the comments.
Update:
The URLs in bold have been requested to add to the list.
Related posts:
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Microsoft is still not willing to settle their “divorce” with Kai-Fu Lee
W3C Proposes Standards For Widgets
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51 Responses for "Microsoft – The Only Ones Following Web Standards!"
December 22nd, 2005 at 7:02 am
1I cant believe this hasn’t been posted on the net before. Very interesting stats!
Microsoft and double standards…. Develop a browser that doesnt adhere to standards, but develop their website so that it does!?
December 22nd, 2005 at 8:42 am
2Just to add linux to the list;
* Redhat : 7 errors
* Suse : 3 errors
* gnu : complete failure due to encoding error
* Debian : No errors
Oh, and this page? 42 errors. 42? Conspiracy!
December 22nd, 2005 at 8:57 am
3pfft, standards are so overrated. what did they for get to put a / in their br tags or something?
I think some stuff is important, but other things are just being nitpicky
but, ok, perhaps yahoo should update some stuff, but they’ve been around forever.
what’s myspace’s excuse. that site’s new and they still use nested tables for everything and it drives me crazy!
December 22nd, 2005 at 9:30 am
4Wow – I can’t believe it either. That is shear craziness. I am with Jason, how can they adhere to web standards for their websites yet not fully develop their browsers to support the same standards? Odd.
Elissa – standards are not really overrated, but under untilized. Standards are there to help us as designers keep our sites ‘forward compatible’ which in the long run will keep our rework to a minimum.
December 22nd, 2005 at 9:31 am
5* mozilla.org (and .com) has no errors
* http://www.opera.com has no errors
* http://www.konqueror.org has no errors
* IE home (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx) has 42 errors
I was going to say that the web browser people make good sites, but that last one’s an exception. Maybe the site was put together by marketing people?
December 22nd, 2005 at 10:38 am
6JP, I’ll add those except IE, because it is not a homepage. If there is a domain name that redirects specifically to that page let me know.
December 22nd, 2005 at 12:15 pm
7I agree that validation is overrated. Companies like Google, Dell, Sun, etc. can surely affort to hire a guy for a few hours to make their sites validate if they thought it was important. Ever notice that the only sites with the w3c xhtml/css validation icons are amateur or hobbiest sites?
note to fg editors: before criticizing others for not following web standards and telling them to “get their act together”, it may be a good idea to make sure forevergeek.com validates first.
Result: Failed validation, 86 errors
December 22nd, 2005 at 12:41 pm
8One of the biggest headaches I find as a web designer is the old standards issue. Had everyone agreed upon something in the beginning and continued to work together on it, we probably wouldn’t have the problems we have now. Case in point is IE’s inability to render CSS2.1 correctly. Were this not the case, much of the layout voodoo done using tables could be accomplished using CSS div tags. Yes, yes, IE supports div tags, I know. But it can’t render the CSS2.1 spec completely and therefore cannot account for table hacks. See http://www.snook.ca/archives/000177.php for more information.
So my opinion is that if you are in the business of developing websites and you want to continue to pay the rent, you had better know the standards and know what will work and what won’t.
DC
December 22nd, 2005 at 1:30 pm
9those who say “validation is overrated” are the ones that just cant validate their own site…
There are SO MANY good things about standards and just a couple of bad things, that there is NO excuses for invalid markup.
December 22nd, 2005 at 2:19 pm
10note to posters: before saying something like “those who say ‘validation is overrated’ are the ones that just cant validate their own site” and preaching about the virtues of validation, it may be a good idea to make sure your own site validates.
Result: Failed validation, 25 errors
Address: http://www.techdetour.com
December 22nd, 2005 at 2:23 pm
11You know it’s POSSIBLE that the IE developers aren’t the same people who design msn.com. And from reading the IE7 blog it looks like they really want to support standards, they just can’t figure out how to take the huge pile of crap that is the IE codebase and make it work properly. Or maybe that’s what they _want_ you to think…
December 22nd, 2005 at 4:20 pm
12I know my site is not standard compliant, and i have NO excuses for it. Plus, i knew that someone will look out for that, and i still put the url.
But… who are you?
if you say something like “standards are overrated” but hide yourself, then you know your wrong..
December 23rd, 2005 at 3:47 am
13(x)html is not the only standard in the world. There are a lot more, like CSS.
Have you tested the CSS of the Microsoft and MSN websites?
Try it.
December 23rd, 2005 at 9:09 am
14cliche,
I respect your opinion, and agree with your points. I just say what i say because of bunch of people that call themselves “webmasters” and doesnt even know that there is a standard.
joe
December 24th, 2005 at 11:00 pm
15ebay.com = 249 errors!
I expected that with eBay’s whole site is so full of errors and browser compatibility issues. (the
Sell Your Item form STILL isn’t compatible with Firefox) The errors coupled with their apathy towards anything but raking in more money and gobbling up other tech companies, would really be working against them if they weren’t such a total monopoly. They really need to streamline and troubleshoot their existing business structure.
I have e-mailed them on several blatant fraudulant auctions, bad HTML, glitching code, etc. and you are lucky to even get a computer generated e-mail days later.
usps.com = 187 errors!
Another business (US Postal) you would think would know better and actually give a crap about their site. Obviously not – I personally have trouble all the time on their site, trying to do the most simple shipping transactions. The interface is atrocious and clumsy with common shipping options totally missing with no explanation or work-a-round.
E-mail to them trying to help with pointing out the problems goes totally unanswered, too – nice!
December 26th, 2005 at 5:25 am
16People, validation is only one tenth of the issue here, a site can validate and still be complete tag-soup.
If a developer doesn’t know about web standards, then they should get another job, for surely if they don’t then they’re not worth the money.
Standards are not overrated, but validation sure is.
For a website to be acceptable it needs to validate (within one or two warnings) and use semantic markup.
December 29th, 2005 at 3:56 am
17Check
http://sudhakar.wordpress.com/2005/12/28/google-fails-here-buddy/
January 2nd, 2006 at 6:42 am
18select iso-8859-1 as Character Encoding for GNU,…
January 4th, 2006 at 1:16 am
19I had no problem to validate Slashdot and it had only 7 errors which where all caused by not masking & in the links, that’s not that bad.
January 9th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
20The number of errors that validator shows, is most frequently NOT the right number. After the first error a validator often CANNOT validate further properly.
In most cases, when validator reports of 50 or 100 errors, there are no more than a dozen real errors. After correcting them validator is satisfied.
The only way to get RIGHT number of errors looks like this: find the FIRST error, then correct it, then revalidate, find the new FIRST error, correct it, and so on.
January 18th, 2006 at 9:38 pm
21Microsoft follows standards… on their title page only!
windows.com – 19 errors (emty page with flash!)
msdn.com – 101(!) errors
msnbc.com – 225(!!!) erros
Better luck next time.
January 28th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
22Yes, and microsoft.com/downloads spits out 70 errors, as microsoft.com/windows.
January 31st, 2006 at 11:16 am
23I don’t understand what you mean by “GNU – Complete Failure (encoding error).” cause I’ve done the validation test my self and got this anwser:
”
The document located at was checked and found to be valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. This means that the resource in question identified itself as “XHTML 1.0 Strict” and that we successfully performed a formal validation using an SGML or XML Parser (depending on the markup language used).”
February 3rd, 2006 at 10:06 am
24Sorry, but the GNU one validates for me
March 5th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
255/3-2006: http://www.msn.no outputs over 1000 errors
March 22nd, 2006 at 2:23 am
26HA! But Hotmail.com has 4 errors! hehe
April 30th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
27I think the question of standards is solely based on the developer it may be set by a group of intelectuals but were the ones developing so we can get our way if we want to, i have many problems with microsoft websites considering the amount of tracking cookies and ads they omit. also XP doesnt come within an inch of the standards (yet i use it cmon you know every one does) the 3 main colours that you shouldnt use are yellow green and red, these are for the incluesive purpose of disabled people yet microsofts main colours fall in with those colours. I think i should stop talking now or else my comment will be as long as the post….. *Should i consider posting in the future* Yes Yes i should
CYA
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