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Benchmarking DOCTYPE validation in Fortune 500's Web sites

by Aggiorno Team 7. March 2008 06:24

By Federico Zoufaly

Maybe the first thing you ask yourself when you begin to learn about the world of Web Standards is just what their current state of use is. How many companies are currently following Web standards? Given the size of the Web, we decided to try and address this question by analyzing the home pages of the complete Fortune 500 list. These companies are used as a benchmark for many aspects of the business world, so why not use them as a benchmark regarding the adoption of Web standards?

Results are very interesting and I would say even somewhat surprising...

Here comes the first set of interesting results of 498 pages that have been analyzed (the remaining two were not available at the time of the analysis).

1) DOCTYPE Declaration

For a browser to attempt to interpret a Web page using a certain standard, the DOCTYPE declaration of the page must be analyzed. If a page does not specify a DOCTYPE or if the DOCTYPE it specifies is incorrect, then the browser will render it in quirks mode. Out of the Fortune 500 companies’ home pages, 169 of them (34%) do not declare a DOCTYPE, 60 of them (12%) declare a DOCTYPE but the declaration is incorrect or the DOCTYPE points to an outdated type. The rest or 268 of the home pages (54%) do specify a correct DOCTYPE. That's almost half of the entrance doors to the world's most powerful companies simply being left to be rendered in a hope-you-can-guess-my-original-design-intentions way!!

2) Rendering Mode

Some DOCTYPEs are designed as a transition towards more strict standards; there are really three types of rendering supported by common browsers: quirks, almost standard and full standard modes. Out of the Fortune 500 home pages, 229 (46%) render in quirks mode, 245 (49%) in almost standard mode and only 23 (5%) render in full standard mode.

Doctype USE: Fortune 500 Home Pages

3) XHTML vs HTML

There are two equally valid and common set of standards used for markup in Web pages: XHTML or HTML. Both provide transitional and strict DOCTYPES. Out of the Fortune 500 set, only 328 (66%) specify a DTD, out of which 169 (34%) HTML and 159 (32%) XHTML. Furthermore, 59 out of 169 HTML pages render in quirks mode, while only 1 XHTML page renders in quirks mode. Additionally, 10 HTML pages render in full standard mode and 100 render in almost standard mode. On the other hand, 13 XHTML pages render in full standard mode and 145 render in almost standard mode. This shows that 110 HTML pages render in either full or almost standard mode, while 158 XHTML pages follow the same behavior.

From the above results we can draw some interesting remarks:

As seen from the above statistics, there is definitely an interest among Fortune 500 companies to comply with Web standards, however almost 50% of them still do not support a correct DOCTYPE declaration. Interestingly enough, 12% of them probably think they are working in a standard mode (since they try to declare a DOCTYPE), but they fail to declare a correct type.

It is important to observe that the fact that a Web page contains a correct DOCTYPE declaration does not mean that the page is syntactically correct or that it validates against a Web standard (this is a topic for a future post); it only shows that there has been some effort from the developer side to move towards Web standards.

On the topic of XHTML vs HTML as a Web standard there is no clear separation among Fortune 500 companies, however, it seems, from the data above, that XHTML overall is used more consistently towards standards adoption than HTML.

The discussion on the Mozilla Developer Center about DOCTYPE sniffing, shows detailed information on how Mozilla attempts to figure out a page DOCTYPE. It provides an insight on how complex the job of a Web browser is and how this complexity is derived directly from a lack of support of Web standards from organizations.

The fact that rendering web pages is such a complex task because of the lack of use of standards is is probably the most important conclusion:, to make a better Web we need more standards adoption by the industry!

Comments? What DOCTYPE declaration are you using? Are you sure it is an accepted full or almost standard one?

Please let us know if you found some inconsistency in your site. How do you compare to the Fortune 500?

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Tags: doctype validation, html vs xhtml, doctype benchmark

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Comments

3/29/2008 5:15:28 AM #

adoption of 'web standard' browsers and websites is in my next dream..

I'm not a web designer/developer/programmer..
I'm just a regular user

I have found w3c site and validome.org for the mark up validation
which one should I use?

How do I know my blog in 'full or almost standard one'?

Thank you.

dani

4/7/2008 10:35:45 AM #

I was not aware of Validome.org. Thank you for pointing it to my attention.
The w3c site is the "official" site for validation, however Validome seems to be very complete product as well.

It is great to see users that care about web standards. If developers used standards more conssistently web browser technologies could be simplified and I am sure we would see a lot more innovation there.

As for your blog, you should use either one of the services and see what the results are. The service will tell you the type of document used by your blog and weather it validates or not.

Aggiorno Team

1/6/2009 8:01:49 AM #

thank for your explenation about web standars validation, Now I more understand about web standars.

Regrads.

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2/23/2009 1:05:29 AM #

This article simply ROCKS ! That was a great read for me. I simple agree on every word written, keep it up with all the good work.. You have got my Thumbs UP !!!
Thank you,

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4/29/2009 11:57:42 PM #

VEry informative post.I googled searched and found this post about DOCTYPE.thanks a lot for this informative article

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4/30/2009 3:07:31 PM #

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5/3/2009 11:48:09 PM #

Nice one by you.

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5/9/2009 11:23:06 PM #

Very interesting article, thanks for sharing...

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5/14/2009 5:35:31 PM #

Thanks a lot for this information. It is very much appreciated.

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5/15/2009 11:56:42 AM #

Fortune because DOCTYPE ?

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5/15/2009 11:09:17 PM #

There are many discussions on the Web regarding the merits of using Web standards. And typical of all discussions, there are two sides.

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5/15/2009 11:09:31 PM #

The argument in favor of using Web standards claims that using cleaner code results in improved cross browser compatibility and lower maintenance costs.

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5/15/2009 11:09:50 PM #

Here’s the first example of how following standards can improve your interaction with Google. Google is "blind.” Google only sees the text that is embedded in your page. That means no images, no java script, and no animations. Providing an alternate description for non-textual information (alt attribute in XHTML) is a part of following standards. Not including an alternate description means you are missing an opportunity to provide information to Google. ALT descriptions, as they relate to Web standards, affect search rankings!

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5/21/2009 10:19:03 PM #