Website Validation Showdown - Results and Findings All Sites
2009-09-20 - I've spent the last 14 days totally immersed in Website Validation routines on 745 websites. During that time, I've discovered a multitude of markup issues that have been overlooked by Webmasters who don't care about validation or the documents they are producing. The results prove IT!
I've had to personally review each of the 745 website home page documents validated. For some of you, I'm probably more intimate with your markup than you are yourself. So, without further ado, here's a summary of my findings along with Top 10 Lists that you don't want to be on.
Summary of Findings as of 2010-10-23 06:06
- We found 37,086 HTML/XHTML Errors, 16,311 HTML/XHTML Warnings, and 16,441 CSS Errors on 745 website home page documents.
- We found 1,264 multiple instances of IDs (aka ID Already Found). When these errors are encountered, it is usually the first instance of the ID that functions, the others after the first instance are NULL.
- We found 2,912 missing alt attributes. There SHOULD be NO missing alt attributes. This is a major oversight on those who have failed to specify them or use an empty
alt=""string per protocol. - We found Webmasters who are overzealous with their HTML Commenting practices. You should avoid having more than 2 adjacent hyphens within an HTML Comment which means the practice of this
<!---------- Comment ---------->is INVALID markup. This<!-- Comment -->is VALID markup.W3C:
A common error is to include a string of hyphens ("---") within a comment. Authors should avoid putting two or more adjacent hyphens inside comments.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.4 - We found too many HTML/XHTML markup errors in
<head></head>elements that MAY have fatal consequences at some point in crawling routines. - We found an alarming percentage of issues with redirects at the host name level e.g. www vs. non-www. For example, server headers returning a 302 Found Status instead of a 301 Moved Permanently, non-www returning a 404 Not Found, or both www and non-www resolving with a 200 OK server header status. Bad Webmasters, Bad!
We are currently monitoring 735 All Sites website home page documents for 37,086 HTML/XHTML Errors, 16,311 HTML/XHTML Warnings, 16,441 CSS Errors, 2,912 missing ALT Attributes and 1,264 ID Instances Already Defined. We performed our last group update on 2010-10-23 06:06.
C0DE GREEN
Promote Your 
C0DE GREEN BADGE (copy chiclet image to your website). You can link directly to your dynamic validation results by using the Fragment ID associated with your valid and monitored listing e.g...
http://www.seoconsultants.com/validation/showdown/#SEOConsultants
Hover your cursor over the domain name for # confirmation. Fragment IDs ARE Case Sensitive.
Fragment IDs ARE available for ALL listings by browsing to the appropriate Tagged Category and appending the URI with #Fragment e.g...
http://www.seoconsultants.com/validation/showdown/seo#SEOConsultants
C0DE GREEN Team Members are PR0UDLY H0N0RED on the default Showdown page.
