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not declare a DOCTYPE, 60 of them (12%) declare a DOCTYPE but the declaration is incorrect or the DOCTYPE points to an outdated type.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.
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?