Ooh, here we go again, but whilst gandering on Xiven.com, I noticed there has been yet another round of XHTML advocacy in this blog entry.
Evan Goer has done a bit of digging round the WWW and written the following:
In the spirit of Marko Karppinen’s The State of the Validation, here are the results of testing 119 XHTML sites for standards compliance. This is not a rigorous scientific exercise; the methodology had several shortcomings, some of which I detail below.
The following was the validation criteria:
- Level 1
- The Simple Validation Test: The “main” page must validate as XHTML.
- Level 2
- The Laziness Test: Three secondary pages must validate as XHTML.
- Level 3
- The MIME-type Test: The site must serve up the proper MIME-type
application/xhtml+xmlto conforming user agents.
Regarding the MIME-type test required for “Level 3” validation, I had already done a little digging a while ago.
But anyway, Evan Goer’s findings were:
Of the 119 XHTML sites tested:
- 88 sites (74%) failed Test 1 (“Simple Site Validation”).
- 18 sites (15%) passed Test 1, but failed Test 2 (“The Laziness Test”).
- 12 sites (10%) passed Test 2, but failed Test 3 (“The MIME-type Test”).
- Leaving us with one site (1%) that managed to pass all three tests.
The single fully valid site was beandizzy. However, I know my own site is in the darkest corner on the Internet, rarely visited so probably overlooked, but I knew off-hand that Thomas “Xiven” Pike and Matthew “PhotoMatt” Mullenweg would pass, and Mark Pilgrim’s used to do so as well…
Evan Goer has written a follow up though. :D
In anycase, I personally think I’m more a “Pimp-Geek” than “Alpha Geek”… :P
